Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

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> I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.

You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without college (or high school) degrees, meanwhile in many places there was barely a recession in the tech sector, and if there was, it was over very quickly.

I feel like every HN thread about a successful startup, or a reminder of the excellent salaries we get for doing things that we love, should include someone behind us, whispering in our ear that the majority of bankruptcies are from people with unexpected medical problems, 75% of whom had insurance, and that last year 20% of children in the US grew up in households making less than $22,000 for a family of four.

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL.

My insistence on refusing to believe that you are the result of forces beyond your control perhaps comes directly from this experience. Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible because of the various capitalist systems of control, yet here I am today, hobnobbing with high HN society (kidding).

I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.

I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.

Well I guess your anecdote beats statistics, let's all go home now!

Come, come. I'm just saying that even if you come from a low-income household, you're more than just a gear in some deterministic machine. I'm not saying these statistics are invalid whatsoever.

Statistics is dangerous in the sense that some use it to frame their potential for success, adopting “Well I guess statistics says I won't get a nice job in the current state of economy considering my social position, so why bother doing things”-like attitude.

Leaving aside the fact that an ESL teacher even working part time somewhere near mountain view should probably net 25k pretty easily (there's always unemployment to factor in, and I have no interest in going too personal either), do you really see no advantages of attending public school in Mountain View vs a town in, say, Mississippi? Or having a teacher for a mother vs, say, a migrant worker?

It's a pretty fundamental error to assume that you are a good sample for that kind of conclusion. My examples were deliberate. It's nice to think that exercise and eating right can avoid medical issues, and you certainly can influence your chances of needing 20 years of kidney treatments or needing early joint replacement. But the leading causes of death in the US are heart disease and cancer, even amongst the physically fit, and that still doesn't preclude that latent heart condition, or getting hit by a car while on your bike, and suddenly facing hospital bills of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Your life is yours to create in many of the same ways that your startup's success is yours to create. You just have to make sure you define success as including adapting to and (most importantly) living with failure. Meanwhile, don't assume those that are hurting right now didn't dream or work hard enough; far better to start from the assumption that in addition to those qualities you also had good timing and incredible luck.

Whew, quick assumptions -- That would be Mountain View Trailer Park in lovely, rural, Durango Colorado [ http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=37.229004,-107.8021... ] (Although in that shot you can't see the sign, I assure you it's called Mountain View Trailer Park, because of the view of the Mountains )

However, I spent the majority of my youth in New Mexico, with close to the lowest public education ratings in the country.

Outside of that, I guess we're simply in fundamental disagreement about the nature of success. Sure, doing groundbreaking work might be impossible or at least very unlikely for the average person, but I believe that anyone can be successful (in a pragmatic sense) for the same reason I believe in the central limit theorem. The most successful scientists are not necessarily the smartest, but the ones who publish the most -- the same can be said of any discipline. In short, unrelenting persistence is key, and depth always beats breadth.

I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm young and dumb and haven't been jaded by the world yet. Maybe I'm Malcom Gladwelling myself into thinking that there's some rhyme or reason behind the (personally qualified) success I feel I've achieved. Still, I am of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, it will spread from your life into your work. There are no real limitations to what you can do. There may be temporary periods of plateaus or even deep valleys, but you can transcend them. I have seen this too many times to declare our ultimate fate and legacy of our work entirely accidental.

> Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible

Then those people are idiots. However, the statistics don't lie. It is very, very difficult. It's called a cycle of poverty for a reason. Having said that, I commend your passion and attitude as someone who came from a family of four well below the poverty line. It really is key to getting anywhere.

> I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.

This is true, but it's only in the US where medical crises lead to financial ruin, increasingly so with the revised (personal) Bankruptcy laws of the last few years. Personal responsibility is something I think everyone can get behind, but the system is plain broken, and that is the far bigger problem.

> I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.

I fundamentally agree with this, but it dangerously ignores certain realities and systemic problems in our society. Be very careful of adopting the attitude "well I made it, so therefore everyone should be able to." Everyone's individual circumstances are different and there's more random luck involved then anyone cares to admit.

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