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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

Is is customary to comment on a submission without upvoting it? That's how I feel about this one...

No disrespect and no offence meant, but I'll never understand all these privileged people who have a lot of money, and subsequently free time, and still feel this way about their lives.

How come it's always poor, lower/mid class people who don't have enough money that always complain about not being able to do things (hobbies, interests, desires...) and always the rich, upper class people who complain that they don't have an interest in anything since they can have everything :-/

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People, progressive especially, tend to believe that opportunity allows a pre-existing will to flourish. Progressives tend to believe the will to use opportunity is innate.

As a social conservative, I disagree with this. Opportunity and will to make use of opportunity are two separate things and usually originate separately. Our will to make use of opportunity may come from necessity, social obligation, or some other developed desire. But this will is NOT innate.

I believe this reality is one reason that diminishing social obligation, to both learn and to teach, to apprentice then master, is important to maintain. I believe this reality is why many progressive policies fall flat.

> As a social conservative, I disagree with this. Opportunity and will to make use of opportunity are two separate things and usually originate separately. But this will is NOT innate.

I'd go further and say that the reason any aristocracy has ever survived for more than a generation is because at the core of all its elaborate culture is a machine built to aggressively indoctrinate its next generation to be extremely moderate and conscious of its use of privileges.

There is a progressive ideological strain that banks its legitimacy on the belief that poverty can be one day eliminated, while traditional varieties of aristocrats believe that concentrated privileged is an inherent part of nature that needs to be managed. A "pure" progressive ideology would rise or fall with its apparent success -- it's also possible to imagine also an impure progressive ideology is a barbershop pole of which the real aristocrats are the ones working to maintain the illusion, stringing everyone else along.

That's how I see it anyway, not that I know what's really going on.

I think we are using the same word "progressive", but have a different definition. When I say "progressive", I mean someone who believes history marches forward to a destination. "God" to such a progressive could be "The Eyes of History", that is, an imagined future where people look back and judge them, to see if they were on "the right side of history". Such progressives believe they have Gnosis, some type of knowledge that grants them insight into how the world should be, and that the world should be transformed to match this vision, not incrementally changed to what is good.

The "progressive" label stems from the vision that they have foreknown vision of what the world should look like and they want to transform the world to look like that.

This type of progressive isn't held back from apparent failures. The response to a failure by a progressive, is "It failed because you weren't doing it right" (that wasn't real communism) or "It failed because you weren't doing enough of it" (you only spent 2% of revenue on DEI training, we need to commit more to the goal of equity, an administered council dedicated to force equal outcomes).

> When I say "progressive", I mean someone who believes history marches forward to a destination.

Doesn't check out.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/progressivism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_St...

Maybe you're confusing it with philosophical historical progress, then comparing that somehow with your own stated social conservativism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/progress/

All I'm trying to say is that you have a very special definition of progressive and you're going to talk past everyone if you're only equipped with that.

As a progressive, I don't disagree that the will to use opportunity may not be universal; or at least that it may be scaled down a lot in some people in absence of compulsion. I think it's obvious that if you remove the necessity 'stick' of eviction, starvation, loss of a vehicle/internet access/autonomy/independence, etc that forces people to pursue 'opportunity' in the form of an otherwise unfulfilling and uncomfortable career, they won't show up to that hateful job anymore. I know some of my fellow progressives believe that we can offer UBI sufficient for basic necessities and people will still choose to show up and stock shelves, scrub plates, plunge toilets, or trowel concrete for $10/hr of 'fun money' opportunity, I think those people have probably never worked those fields in their life and have an insufficient imagination to predict how the people who currently do those things relate to their jobs.

Where I disagree with you is that I don't think this maintenance of a will to use opportunity and social obligation is worth more than the suffering of the people who are coerced by our maintenance of this necessity, or who fail to meet the demands placed on them and experience the consequences of that failure.

Yes, were we stranded together from Shackleton's Endurance hauling sledges, or adrift at sea rowing a lifeboat, or subsistence farming to eke out survival on a desert island, and everyone had to pull their weight or we'd all die, I'd pull my fair weight and I'd advocate for the expulsion of anyone who didn't pull theirs and in so doing imperil the entire group.

No, we are not stranded together in this way on Spaceship Earth. We have enormously greater wealth and resources than we require to sustain our existence. No longer does 90% of society need to devote themselves to farming wheat at 7 bushels per acre to provide bread for a himself and a small fraction in excess that with 40 of his neighbors' farms can support handful of non-farmers for his community like a blacksmith, a miller, a tailor, and a feudal lord. A single tractor can seed, fertilize, or harvest dozens of acres per hour, and achieve yields exceeding 70 bushels per acre. We merely have to distribute the value more equitably, even if the amount of that value is halved, quartered, or decimated by people opting out of the will to work.

> I know some of my fellow progressives believe that we can offer UBI sufficient for basic necessities and people will still choose to show up and stock shelves, scrub plates, plunge toilets, or trowel concrete for $10/hr of 'fun money' opportunity

This is a strawman.

No one expects people to still do that for $10 an hour, that's not a lack of thought from people promoting UBI, that's the feature they want delivered.

The idea behind UBI (or another scheme that would actually work, anyway), would be that 1) you plunge your own toilets or 2) if you want someone else to do it, you pay them accordingly.

In such a society, your farmers, builders, utility providers, tradespeople and so on would likely earn more, and educated white-collar jobs would likely earn less relatively. This is already what happens in more limited subsets: devs that want jobs in an interesting sector like the games industry typically earn less than devs taking soulless corporate jobs like banking or ad-tech. Lawyers that work for NGOs typically earn less than lawyers that work for the above soulless corporations.

Farming, building tractors, maintaining them, working long days in the sun, distributing food, building and maintaining the trucks to distribute the food, building the refrigeration units to keep the food safe, preparing the food, medical professionals to see sick workers, laboratories to process sample to support medical professionals...

But it's okay for some people to just opt-out of work. Everyone else will want to do this work because they have an innate passion for it. (sarcasm)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

> I believe this reality is one reason that diminishing social obligation, to both learn and to teach, to apprentice then master, is important to maintain. I believe this reality is why many progressive policies fall flat.

I'm not sure why you believe progressives think otherwise.

The thing is, progressives believe that the people at the bottom of the society have circumstances so restricting that they are shoved to harmful choices, while people at the top of the society have, essentially, no constraint.

If you believe in challenges that nudge everyone to participate in a healthy way in the society, then, certainly, you also must want these issues to be fixed?

Pretty weird "just so" assertion. conservative-progressive axis is devoid of insight

It is weird that I believe that the will to use opportunity is not innate? Or weird that I see something in people who identify themselves as progressive that I, as a social conservative, is false?

If it happens to you, you'll know what it's like.

That is what is like with all life situations. They are mystery until they happen to you. You don't know what cancer is like or the death of a loved one is like until those things happen to you, and you don't know what the boredom of abundance is like until you have it either.

On the latter, the important thing to get is that much more of what motivates us survival driven than most people realize. When survival is sort of guaranteed, a lot of motivation can dry up along with a lot of the juice of life.

That's very well put and I fully agree with what you describe on the majority of the situations (i.e birth of a child, loss of a pet, other important thing in life...), but I'm a bit confused on how this nicely written "boredom of abundance" can create problems on people.

Oh well, that's probably because I don't have enough money (and time) to do all the things I want to do :-)

I'd wish that for you but it might not make you happy. That's the paradox.

A silly example: when I was young I loved the game civ. In some games I would occasionally actually succeed at defeating all competition. But the game wouldn’t end cause you could try to go to another solar system or something still. But it was much less fun once the competition was over.

You're seriously comparing a cancer diagnosis with being bored while reveling in nigh-infinite opportunity?

There is a simple and obvious solution to this "abundance boredom": remove the abundance. There. Done. Put all your money in charity or, if that's too altruistic of you, lock it away in investments where you can't get at it easily and force yourself to live off of the national median income (~$38k individual, $70k household in the us).

The thing about being poorer is that you can't do the opposite, so it is quite understandable that no one in a poorer position has any sympathy.

If you ever get there, you'll see ;) don't worry, you're not special, and you too can become bored with infinite money... it's just nature.

> You're seriously comparing a cancer diagnosis with being bored while reveling in nigh-infinite opportunity?

Yes I am. I can compare anything even grasshoppers and peanut butter. They often have different colors, but grasshoppers have more legs.

This isn't about wanting sympathy. It's merely an observation.

> How come it's always poor, lower/mid class people who don't have enough money that always complain about not being able to do things (hobbies, interests, desires...) and always the rich, upper class people who complain that they don't have an interest in anything since they can have everything :-/

I used to be poor and then I stopped being poor. Long story. Not rich rich, but honestly wilder than any realistic expectations back home.

Here’s what I noticed happens somewhere around the 180k to 250k salary range – you lose the fire in your belly. All the important things are taken care of, you’re easily saving enough money to retire early, nothing really presents a challenge. Oh you wanna go on vacation? Yeah just go. The money will sort itself out. Oh you want to buy a thing you like? Yeah, just buy it. There is no anticipation and excitement about the things that used to be a big treat yo self moment. It’s just easy.

Sure you’re not buying fancy cars and big houses or whatever … but do you really even want to? Really? Those things add nothing substantial to your life. The hedonic treadmill is no lasting fun. Everything you actually need is trivial to obtain.

So for those of us who learned that life is a grind from a young age, life loses some of the luster when the grind becomes unnecessary. Time to look elsewhere for fulfillment.

> So for those of us who learned that life is a grind from a young age, life loses some of the luster when the grind becomes unnecessary. Time to look elsewhere for fulfillment.

Fascinating. That may explain why my privileged-from-birth coworkers feel so differently about things than I do.

I also find life without the grind to be dull. It's like an MMO with a finished economy, no leveling up process, everyone just sitting around chatting? LOL. Take me to the new server, plz

And the thing that links those two groups of people is their desire for things. Never was religious, but this core point of Buddhism (from an ELI5, admittedly) really resonated with me. Wanting fewer things indeed seems to makes you happier.

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