Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working.

I'm going to be completely honest with you, I really think you need to consider other reasons why people might be depressed in the situation that occurred during the pandemic. I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working (heck, people at my job at the time were struggling pretty badly with mental health to the point where they started reaching out to us.)

I'm not even saying this as a person that has a strong opinion on UBI, and I am sure some people sincerely believe not having a job was a major detriment for them. I absolutely think it did help me, but the way I see it, it helped because it was something to cling onto for a bit of normalcy, and of course, a bit of social interaction. Outside of the pandemic, a job is not nearly as critical for those two things.

I also do personally think that I still broadly like having a job, and I have had almost no gaps in employment since I started working professionally. That said, if money were no object, I would absolutely take breaks off of professional work for months at a time. For me, I find both professional work and hobby work important in very different ways, and wish I had dedicated time for both. Anecdotally I've definitely known engineers who periodically take months or even a year off of work when they get the opportunity and it seems to be a very healthy thing for them.

The existence of UBI would maybe tempt people to rely on it even if it is detrimental to their lives, but I think it's wrong to draw the conclusion that it's bad because jobs can be a source of fulfillment for many. In the future it's very possible we're going to need to approach the problem from another angle anyways, since there's simply no guarantee there will be meaningful work for us all in the future. (I'm not really convinced there won't be, but it feels unreasonable to consider it outside the realm of reasonable possibility.)

> I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working...

I and many others did great. I think someone should do a study of the experiences of introverts vs extroverts and you'll find the latter suffered more and many of the former had a better quality of life as a result.

Working from home was simply a huge boost for many. We suddenly found more time to do our personal projects. Got to work less without dropping productivity etc.

I think you are missing my point. Actually, ever since the pandemic, I prefer WFH/remote work. I mean, I actually did like working in an office for reasons, but there's no doubt about it: I am an introvert.

But being an introvert didn't fix anything else. I had to constantly cycle through masks, got harassed by random strangers when going to the store, had my medical appointments delayed for several months, people I knew were dying, there were shortages of basically everything, and the news cycle was full of panic and anger. And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.

Maybe it's because I live in a rural area, but life here really was great. The impact of the pandemic was really confined to prices increasing. Nobody really got that sick in my community. We all sort of just spent WAAAAYYYY more time with each other.

As long as we avoided the news.

> I had to constantly cycle through masks

I'll grant they were a pain. I don't miss them. They didn't make my life miserable, though.

> got harassed by random strangers when going to the store

Why? Not my experience at all (unless you were refusing to wear a mask).

> had my medical appointments delayed for several months

I can see that being a major problem if you have medical conditions.

> people I knew were dying

Same here. It definitely sucked, but I didn't get depressed by it. I think it comes down to expectations in life. If you go through life thinking "people in their 30s aren't supposed to die", then yes, I can see it being depressing. If you go through life with "one can die any time - be it from disease or a car accident", then a pandemic isn't much of a shock.

To give a different perspective: Long before the pandemic, people I knew died in places like Palestine and Iraq due to conflicts. Yet the whole world lived a happy life despite it. Is this all that different?

And go back a century or more, and people around you dying from disease was the norm (think tuberculosis, etc). That didn't prevent people from having a happy life, and did not make them depressed. It's not (primarily) the circumstances that lead to the depression, but the narrative one has around them.

> there were shortages of basically everything

I got lucky. We happened to accidentally buy an extra set of Clorox wipes just prior to the pandemic. We were going to return them and then the pandemic hit. I was never short.

Hand sanitizer shortages sucked. We certainly conserved our use, and were fortunate never to run out.

As for everything else, I didn't deal with any serious shortages. Somehow always found paper towels, bathroom rolls, soap, etc. And things like cars/appliance shortages - these are not meaningful quality of life things for me.

> and the news cycle was full of panic and anger

If this caused you depression, I say this with the utmost sincerity: I hope you learned the lesson not to waste much time with the news. I was a news junkie for many years, and had cured myself of it years before the pandemic hit (and thankfully never jumped on the social media bandwagon). Video news is the worst, and has almost no redeeming value. You can get much, much more from text sources.

At the end of the day, it wasn't the pandemic but the news media that caused you problems.

> And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.

I guess I'm fortunate in that my Internet never had problems.

The other obvious difference between you and me: You seem to have experience with remote work prior to the pandemic, so your baseline was clearly different. For people like me, the pandemic was the cause of my appreciating remote work.

BTW, I'm not claiming it was great for the majority. Merely pointing out that for many - albeit a minority - it was an improvement on life.

Being able to go for walks on days of nice weather in nice neighborhoods during work hours can be a major improvement on one's mood.

As an introvert who fell quickly into depression at the start of the pandemic, I'm having a very difficult time seeing this comment as anything but gaslighting.

EDIT: Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing, I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.

> Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing

Never said it wasn't. I lost people I know to COVID.

> I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.

I'm not denying that either.

I think you're misreading my comment as saying "For the majority of introverts, it was better than before". I am not asserting any such thing. I am saying that for some, it was better.

You just need to scan HN comments from that time period to find plenty of people who enjoyed their work from home experience during the pandemic.

BTW, I refused to work from home prior to the pandemic. At times I made it a condition of employment that I leave my laptop at work when I went home. So this is definitely not coming from a guy who always liked working from home. When I had to, though, I found the experience to be far superior than commuting every day and dealing with nosy managers.

There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.

Whats more, if you drop out of work to live on the UBI, by definition, you are the poorest person in the country, and if that is not a reason to be depressed I don't know what is.

Except the research shows almost exactly the opposite?

can you elaborate?

Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices? We’ve just lived through four years of insane government spending correlated with the highest inflation in over 40 years.

This is an experiment that has been tried and always has the same results: the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides. UBI experiments “work” because they are elevating the income of a small portion of the population above their peers. It’s not actually universal.

> the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides.

Vis-a-vis food stamps and unemployment checks, I don't think you can draw the correlation you think exists. Particularly past a certain level of poverty, the state ends up spending more to manage the consequences of unemployment than it saves by refusing to fix it. UBI in this case perpetuates inequity but it also greases the wheels of a down-and-out working population that can be motivated by higher standards of living.

From a net-gain perspective, developed nations investing in themselves like this makes sense. The alternative is letting the middle class rot, which is something that only the upper-class would stand to gain from.

Heck, I'm convinced even the upper class benefits long term from the kind of investment you're talking about, for a bunch of reasons.

To name just two examples: Technological progress happens more smoothly when there are mass markets. Society is healthier and safer when everybody feels like they have a stake in it.

> Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices?

The post being replied to said:

> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.

So, the response saying that the research doesn't support that conclusion is not about the "that would not just result in" there, it's about countering the remainder of that point. Most people will not choose to do absolutely nothing. (And if some people do, that's fine!)

That's separate from the many arguments that UBI is not inherently inflationary, which neither the post you replied to or the post it replied to were making.

So there's always inevitably at least one poorest person in the country who is automatically depressed? Omelas is a law of nature?

Well, the way I see it, there is a real possibility that we're going to have to figure out what to do after that happens some day. There's no fundamental law of nature that guarantees we'll have enough work to keep the vast majority of people working.

It already feels like many of the jobs that exist today are bullshit, and knowing that your job is bullshit is not exactly good for your mental health, either.

> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.

I've taken quite a bit of time off between jobs and lived off minimal savings (over a year several times now) and I've experienced exactly what you describe - the boredom and depression. However, I also came out the other side and now I wish this for everyone.

The boredom and depression was because I was operating from the typical mode of being where there was a belief that my only value was that which I could provide to society. This was a belief that's indoctrinated in us from a very young age - through school, grades, parents, and work.

Once this belief fell away, a new kind of motivation has opened up - the curiosity I felt as a kid to create and explore and experiment and follow my interest. The joy of simply being alive, being allowed to live this life without having to perform for anyone, force a persona, or act a particular role.

The thing is, to lose that belief that only a job/work/career can provide us fulfilment, you have to be willing to go through and sit with the depression and grief of realising that that belief was a lie all along.

I only wish I had the stability to do this. I have family relying on me to pay the bills.

How did you do this (unless you got paid massive bucks) and afford to keep a family?

Yes, it was a lot easier to do this as a single guy without a family and pretty minimal material desires.

Mostly it was just living from savings - the first time was a working holiday overseas doing seasonal work with long stretches of time off in between. Later on in my career I was able to save more by keeping my standard of living low (and not buying a house, perhaps unfortunately).

Ultimately I don't think you need to quit everything to see through these beliefs. Meditation was a big part of the process for me and I didn't spend that long doing it. If you watch the mind close enough it becomes clear that so much of what seems so true and real is nothing more than a belief.

Not everyone links their level of wealth to their self esteem. Different strokes for different folks.

I disagree with your first points. I believe the majority of people are trying to get ahead, not just subsist. Why else do so many people work so hard? I think it goes to the myth that the poor in the US are poor because they don't work hard. IMO, I've known so many people with teo jobs, ut has a lot more to do with making $25k/yr for full time work. The median income is low, pay is low.

OTOH, I think you also neglect what benefit UBI would have to those who are currently the poorest. Child poverty, poverty, are big problems for millions of Americans.

You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI. And many of us live in a democracy, so if we all get on the same page, we can decide to just do that.

UBI is some bullshit handwaving to try make social safety nets sound fair. (We give the money to everybody!). We should just stop kidding ourselves and build a more caring and supporting society.

> You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI.

The reason to write that first sentence is because I pointed out that UBI helps those making less than UBI. Of course then it is pertinent to UBI in so far as it is a mechanism to achieve that goal.

Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.

An argument that I have heard for UBI is: UBI is more effective than social safety nets that are doled out by merit, decided by committee. If you recall the so-called "death panels", government committees who decide who gets what healthcare, there is essentially that with various social programs. UBI has the virtue of simplicity, and uniformity helps ensure reach and therefore efficacy.

I am personally unsure whether UBI is the most effective way to build a supportive society, or if it is as good as its proponents claim. Though, neither do I think (respectfully) that your claims about UBI are well supported either

>Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.

Sorry, I was attempting to make two separate claims, both perhaps over generalizations for the sake of impact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com