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Comment by Infinitesimus | Hacker News Reader

1. Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be. This unfairness is why you're here posting on hackernews and someone through no fault of theirs is starving trying to cross the Sahara into greener pastures. It cuts both ways.

2. Hard work rarely ever implies financial success.

3. "...second tier job from the perspective of software professionals". Tiers are a made up concept. An Nvidia programmer working on critical HPC work is in a difference league than someone who is very good at making infinite scroll smooth.

Software is a broad field with different specializations. I don't know what you do but you made a bet and it's probably turned out quite well for you. Other people's bets did worse, others did better.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Remember to be grateful for where you are and how far you've come.

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Thank you for your comment. These are all great points. I absolutely appreciate #1. #2 is a bit harder to accept as it implies I don't have agency. I always had the dogma that my hard work would make a difference from the perspective of financial success. And it has made a difference no doubt. The thing that has preoccupied my thinking is the magnitude. We're talking 100 to 1 when it comes to the impact of luck vs. hard work. This is a bit unsettling for me. Cest la vie I guess.

> #2 is a bit harder to accept as it implies I don't have agency.

Of course you do have agency to a certain extent, the important thing to recognize is that "hard work" leads to mostly linear gains, while to be "successful" (in the "getting $62M in stock options" sense) obviously requires some exponential windfall.

The idea that hard work is the only factor for financial success is a blatant lie, perpetuated by those wishing to justify the almost-Ponzi nature of modern economies. Ever wondered why GDP growth is in terms of percentage, while compensation for labor is linear to the effort/work put in?

> Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be.

Life isn't fair because we make it so. The longer we keep accepting that, the longer we will delay in changing it for the better.

How do you suggest we make life fair? Some things you can make changes to equalize, but how are you going to equalize height or intelligence or something like that?

It isn't fair because entropy is uncaring. You can't control all the variables and so even if you had perfectly balanced society in spreadsheets, you couldn't implement it. This is the fallacy of city planners too, you can't control the human factor, the weather, the global community etc.

Even if we just talk money in one community, you could give everyone the exact same amount of money and through no fault of their own, some people would lose it and some would benefit wildly, because of the human factor. Person A starts a coffee shop that goes bust, person B starts a coffee shop that does well, just due to timing or luck or even the weather the month they opened.

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