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I find this article incredibly inspiring, and my interpretation is that the main character was fulfilled by these accomplishments. The person interpreting the journal uses the word “obsessed”, not as a direct observation, but to put it in contemporary terms. But we have no evidence this person was burnt out.

My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole. I don’t find it constructive. It seems like another flavor of doomerism. Capitalism is not evil— it’s incredibly ingenious and productive. We all live much better for it.

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I think burn out has a lot to do with incentives. When I'm working on a project in which I have a direct interest (intrinsic or financial), or from which I derive a direct benefit (personal, financial, or even intangible), I can work long, long hours without burning out. I'll get tired, and sometimes have to take a break to re-kindle my enthusiasm, but that feels different than burn out.

When, by contrast, I'm working (perhaps against my recommendation) on something (perhaps useless) assigned to me (perhaps sub-optimally) for the (perhaps hypothetical) benefit of (perhaps faceless) others, where my motivation is entirely negative - do this, or maybe lose my job - well... Then I feel burnt out before I even start.

Yep, self-determination is a really really big deal.

But figuring out how to incentivize people to self-determine their way into doing 100% of the things an organization needs to do is a real trick! Some work that still needs to be done just isn't great.

The typical approach is to use a combination of money and "skin in the game" (ownership) to cover those cases. And I think that's essentially the right approach, but this simply won't work for everyone.

And the thing is that it's super tough to separate out less fulfilling work into a distinct job role that can be more highly compensated and done by people who find that more motivating.

I think the best I've seen it work is for managers, who people already expect to be more financially compensated, to fill in these kinds of cracks. If there's something their team needs to do that just isn't getting done without them directing one of their reports to do it, can they do it themselves instead? (And maybe while they're doing it, they can be thinking about whether there is a way someone could build a tool to make it trivial to do the next time it comes up, and then they can probably get their team more excited about building that tool.)

I agree with everything you say.

Implied, but not directly stated: managers should be technically-capable. I also agree, but how do we incentivize that, against all of the headwinds of our industry?

> My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole.

Not just HN. There is a significant correlation between social media use and job burnout

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7710858/

A couple of points By reading HN, we tend to get exposed to world class achievements and improvements leading to a high bar to measure our performance. This can lead to stress, anxiety and feelings of burnout.

The other point is while capitalism has numerous advantages and benefits, I do think it may miss some uncosted externalities (Modern western societies have a tremendous impact on the planet which is hidden from market pressures as exploits different resources). Other examples are the cigarette companies hiding evidence about lung cancer and oil companies hiding research into climate change. If you purely select for profit and no other criteria, it can tend to nasty effects for others

> Capitalism is not evil— it’s incredibly ingenious and productive. We all live much better for it.

Well regulated capitalism is the least worst of all. Even Adam Smith himself didn't imagine "the invisible hand" as some silver bullet.

Unbridled capitalism, much as the US has had since the 70s, is just the transitional period leading to feudalism.

He relates a case where workers paid by the piece worked themselves into the ground.

Capitalism 'just' creates strong incentives for participation in zero-sum, or negative-sum games, without any in-system ability to check it. It 'just' creates strong incentives and imperatives for consolidation of wealth and power. It 'just' trends towards winners winning more.

Under it, a dollar is a dollar, regardless of whether earning it improved the world, left it about the same, or made it worse. Unless you make your dollars have colour[1], it falls into the traps described above.

Fortunately, all capitalist societies, to some extent, assign their dollars colour, through the process called 'regulation'. Unfortunately, the process through which it is produced is called politics, for which we have no good solutions for, and a slew of bad ones.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Capitalism is based on the notion trade and commerce is not Zero-sum, as compared to mercantilism which it replaced. Wealth of Nations is the explanation of why zero-sum thinking is wrong and that the wealth is not gold but economic capacity.

When coupled with the realization that "now" is more valuable than "later", you can put a price on now (interest). This leads to the finance industry, and using a small sum as leverage to borrow and invest a larger sum. Capital has value, because you can trade some capital now for more capital in the future.

While I agree rent seeking exists, it's hard to imagine the world without lending and commerce. Capitalism is the natural result of private property.

Trade is generally not zero-sum, but trade implies transaction between relative-peers. Nation states. Corporations. Groups that have similar amounts of power (Or that can lean on friends.)

Many transactions that happen in a capitalist society are very much not transactions between peers. And those can absolutely be, and often are zero-sum, or negative-sum.

Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?

From my limited perspective, unless you actually do get rid of private ownership imbalances will exist and Power imbalances will exist regardless of the economic system.

> Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?

Start by reading literally anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_Un... and observe that most of the implemented solutions largely consisted of curtailing the rights of capital holders to do whatever they please in the employer-employee relationship. Weekends, sick leave, overtime pay, company scrip, employer responsibility for worker safety, fair employment, the right to free association, the right to work without harassment... Capitalism didn't produce any of those things - it is incapable of producing them - but has fought tooth and nail, sometimes with batons and bullets against them.

Power imbalances continue to exist, the purpose of all these work-arounds to them is mitigating the harm that someone with power can inflict on someone without.

It's a false equivalency to expect Capitalism to produce specific laws or outcomes as it's an economic system and not a government.

Both Sweden and USA are Capitalist but have very different views. You're critiquing an economic system as not self-fixing the flaws without proposing an alternative you would expect to do so.

I agree capitalism has flaws, but feel history has shown the flaws to be manageable.

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