The quiet rebellion of a little life
caitlynrichardson.substack.com
caitlynrichardson.substack.com
I bet if you were to ask most doctors, one of the most heartwrenching things they are required to do is keep people alive and in pain long past the point of compassion.
I am not advocating for euthanasia, but within the last 2 years I have observed such cruelty only once averted
It's inherent because of the diminishing returns for aggressive healthcare intervention. We're all going to die. We could ramp up the costs of intervention to arbitrary levels in a final death spasm, but we will still die. So, we have to strike some kind of balance.
The harder part, I think, is thinking about the decades leading up to that final end game. How do you trade off quality of life in different decades by saving and time-shifting some of your spending power into the future. It's not just medical costs but all the other aspects of life which carry a mix of predictable and unpredictable costs.
Fortunately, the 2 are often correlated, the best ways to prepare for a long lifespan are the same as preparing for a long health span, and that includes a high quality of life.
I'm working on the habits I have most direct control over: healthy eating, cardio exercise and reducing stress.
It wasn't an accident. Near as I can tell there is a not-insignificant part of the American psychological context that amounts to a threat of utter destitution should you not choose to keep slaving away. By Krom, America needs homeless people to show you just how far you can fall unless you keep serving the man.
[edit] incidentally, if this fad doesn’t burn out soon we’re going to need a setting to fix it under the heading of accessibility. I expect there are several categories of people for whom this is even more annoying than for most of us, and who can’t just get over it or re-train their brain to do better without the very-useful cues provided by capital letters, notably dyslexics.
>The entirety of the book's 80 pages are one sentence, without punctuation, capitalization or spatial breaks.
https://www.michael-maiello.com/logical-loops-with-georges-p...
If you expect a better than average quality of life, then you will have to compete for it. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to be bequeathed a sufficiently large portfolio.
I mean I get you but it's not happening any family people in the meantime...
I don't know. Is this some arrangement you have had in your life? Being supported by others wasn't never an option for me, I will not expect to be the case now that my chosen career doesn't look as great anymore. I live frugally (after losing everything creating a startup) and saved most of my salary in the past 5 years tho which now gives me some space to breath and plan for the next breakthrough. If things get better again, you should use the current terrible position you are in as a reference to also save most of your salary if you get a good job in tech.
Mine was a bit of a snarky question admittedly. As said above (and I just noticed I made a typo or a grammar mistake, not sure which of both as I typed on the phone), I get your idea but nobody cares how are people supporting themselves during transitional periods. :(
We leave a lot on the table in terms of doing less and getting more — meaning, contentment, joy, safety — from our lives.
The exception being, as you noted, some wealthy people (not all, though).
breakfast in bed on a sunday morning- sticky buns and black coffee, sharing a bed with my best friend. having more children. walking through the park while listening to the sounds of nature and kids laughing in the playground nearby. decompressing after a day at work on the couch with a cat who nestles besides my belly while i read, sip hot tea, and listen to tender jazz. cooking pasta for dinner, drinking wine, slow dancing in the kitchen with a lover. maybe starting a garden. farmers markets on weekends carrying a wicker basket full of apricots and hydrangeas. a soft, romantic, simple existence.
... this is the life of a wealthy retired person.
Most people who have a job where they aren't influencers, don't achieve anything, just go in for 8 hours a day and do ordinary work, are earning ordinary money, living in a small apartment, no pets allowed, have a marginally reliable car, can't afford to shop at the farmer's market, and with kids and homework and laundry and daily chores just want to get some sleep at the end of the day, spending three hours on cooking and enjoying a slow dinner with wine and music just isn't going to happen.
In what world does making pasta take 3 hours? If you wanted to be fast, making pasta is literally a 10 min endeavor. “Slow” could mean spending an hour… or 30 mins. Nothing there is unreasonable.
There’s plenty to be gleaned from shirking the “keeping up with the Jones’s” mentality and being able to enjoy with less. Maybe that less isn’t true poverty, but even then there’s plenty of ways to foster contentment.
It reminds me of the average “indie hacker” mentality: just move to Bali and live off $2-3k.
The problem is that it just doesn’t work once you are past a certain age, and suddenly have “adult life”: parter, kids, aging parents.
I’d love to life a “little life”. Read books with my partner, drink coffee in the morning while watching the birds. The problem is that one small unlucky event, like being laid off, or someone you love getting sick, and it can all snowball into oblivion.
And the realistic thing to accept is that money solves a lot of problems. And in order to make enough of it, one should forgo the luxury if “little life” to some extent.
> The problem is that one small unlucky event, like being laid off, or someone you love getting sick, and it can all snowball into oblivion.
that's why financial health would be to allocate 15% of your indie $2-3k to saving account to cover this unlucky event.
Sometimes I feel like we, as society, became so detached from each other and from reality. Maybe it's because of social networks that keep pumping up the idea that everyone can be rich by investing $5 a day instead of buying Starbucks, or that the path to financial freedom is as simple as "just buy a house and rent it for $5k a month"; or that people suddenly started to call randoms in Twitter their friends. But I feel like people lost the ability to be empathetic towards others. They simply are unable to see and accept that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different set of rules that the ones they grew up under.
it sounds like you need to make a choice to allow them to eat your life (spend your limited years of your life as race rat to satisfy their habits instead of "little life" if it is preference) or reject them.
> They simply are unable to see and accept that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different set of rules that the ones they grew up under.
sorry, I don't understand how this claim(which I also don't understand why you put it here) connected to $5 starbucks and renting a home. Maybe you could expand?
Now I took my children to Africa precisely so they can see and understand that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different conditions than the ones they themselves experienced so far.
Maybe this seems true if you live in SF or NYC or are surrounded by people who are continuously preaching "high acheivement", but there indeed many people who lead a simple life. They don't have all the comforts that they could otherwise have if they pushed themselves to have more money, but they earn enough at their job for their own modest needs and contentment. It's the feeling that you always have to be reaching for the next rung in the ladder that creates anxiety.
but economics which america would not dream teach their young is that you can also cut expenses :) this is the quiet life part that you missed in the post… how much money do you think you need to make to have an insane level-of-comfort life in say Hope, Arkansas…?
I'm so sick and tired of the techbro response to a rising cost of living and a lower quality of life is just "lol be poor :)". There's a reason half the country cheered when that CEO got shot. Maybe there just isn't enough Hope in Arkansas.
as far as all the other questions, ask yourself the same for an urban area too :) and yes, there are great schools, great doctors, everything you need is there or a short ride away.
I am not surprised by your reply, expected to see many more, brainwashing is strooooong in the USA and these are very predictable responses
I think if the approach was, be happy with less, then sure we can get on board. There is a massive difference in being able to afford more and choosing less, than being forced to have less.
I’m sorry, but do you know what a “slave” is?
I can’t imagine the kind of hopelessly ignorant perspective a person must have to say something like this.
I just put the days I'm going to be out on the calendar and inform my team/boss/manager after the fact.
And these weren't cushy FAANG jobs either. Just your typical run of the mill IT-adjacent roles.
> when you can get paged on your honeymoon or your kids birthday
Yes, you can be paged, but if you set your boundaries, you don't have to respond to the page. Again, I don't remember ever jumping up and treating something like that as an emergency. Always prioritized my own errands first.
why do you have to do that? who is this “boss” of yours that needs to know about what you do?
as long as you work for someone you are owned and exploited. if we had a nice chat meeting each other irl and we broached the subject of compesation and you said “I am L76 at Netflix making $965k” I am would be immensely happy for you but would think “this lovely mate is actually worth $1,500,000 and just doesn’t even know it”
Truly, are you this deluded and bereft of perspective? Making such a claim about the vast majority of modern workers in the developed world is not only completely off the rails but also an insult to the real meaning of slavery and those who suffer it or have.
You've never exchanged money for someone elses labor in your life? Or had someone pay you to deliver your labor? Are you so privileged as to have never done either and thus live in a bubble that allows you to believe such nonsense as the above?
If you were a FAANG slave, Google could literally prevent you from marrying, or ship you in a box to a different country without warning, or just kill you if you're no longer passing the bar.
I get it, I really do. I find it a daily struggle. Last week I told my boss I couldn't travel this week. He was fine about it, there wasn't even a discussion. But I've worried about it ever since. Not because I want a raise or a promotion, but because I need this job and I worry that I won't get another good one if I lose it. I need it to cover my families needs, I need it so that I can live a good life post work. I need to think about post work because we all know that when your hair goes white and you struggle with the accessibility of the office you're not going to get another one.
So, there is no compact that will create the feeling of safety and fulfillment that this article wishes for. Just money.
Money is the best freedom buyer. Don't trust anyone who says "Money doesn't buy happiness". That's rich-people propaganda to keep the rest of us dependent.
As Lucy Liu said in a fantastic interview: Do everything in your power to accumulate fuck you money as early as possible. Because then you can say No.
Even a few months of buffer is enough to buy lots of wellbeing. Having FIRE money is obviously even better.
Money clearly matters a lot, though. Why? Because we live in an objectively evil society—an oligarchy that has no language but money.
We are on HN. The typical person here can achieve freedom for themselves and their family. And we should work to change the system also.
Remember that someone with 2mil can easily FIRE in America and still be closer to the destitute than the billionaires. 2mil is pretty achievable to most people on HN and we should definitely encourage each other to get there.
Vilifying small scale financial freedom is part of tall poppy syndrome and plays directly into the hands of wealthy oligarchs. The more people who think getting rich is bad, the better.
We gotta always remind each other that a millionaire is closer to us normies than they are to the billionaires.
I think most humans are pleasure seeking and would choose the above, if it were a choice! But the pinnacle for most people I know would be to enjoy one or two of the above, on the margins of a hard-working life.
It's presented as some sorta contrast / revelation, but story is one that wasn't going to happen without the first part.
Reminds me of the start up that gets acquired and the former founder sitting on his pile of cash upset about what they do with his product. Bro you took gobs of money to let them do that thing ...
I'd be most interested in folks jiving those two lives and how they intersect rather than the almost strange born again type stories.
There is a better way, but you can’t drink any of the kool aid. I wish I could tell other people how to do what I have done, but I have come to understand that it only works for me because i tend not to think things are important that other people value, and I value things that other people sacrifice to obtain those unimportant things.
It’s worked very well for me. If I have a piece of advice I think people might be able to use, it would be to own a place. It should be cheap and have little or no property taxes. A bit of land. Maybe an acre or two. In the country but not too far off a road. It’s not an investment, it’s not your home, it’s a place. Build a house there. Build it yourself. A very modest house with your own hands.
Learn how. Build a home that you can walk away from and come back in ten years and not be bothered by the inevitable decay. The absolute minimum. This is not your home. This is your refuge. Put it in a legal situation so that it can’t be taken from you (obviously this also means you don’t really own it, and can never sell it) The worst that can ever happen is that you have to go and live there while you start from zero.
Now, you will never be without a place.
For most people, this will be enough to give them courage to take some necessary risks. That is enough.
If you want to take it farther (you probably don’t) this is what I have done, and I’m not at all alone in this experience:
Once you have a place, Become unemployable. Any job is a means to a very near end. If you have to work, take a job that pays well but you hate. invest your time and resources in anything where your efforts will be rewarded disproportionally to the risks. 10:1 bets on 1000:1 odds. There are so many things that people will simply ignore because the chance of failure is 90% if done well… but there are a lot of those losing propositions that will compensate way above their risk.
The hack is you can never go bust. Only your health can stop you. you have your place. You have to always be willing to put it all on the line. You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again. You get better, you get smarter, you get wiser. Eventually you win. Is it enough? If it’s not, set half aside in durable assets, and keep going.
Most people are so risk averse that you will have these opportunities basically to yourself.
99.99 percent will find a reason that this won’t work for them, and they’ll be right.
But sometimes you’ll run into someone else in a different stage of the same game. If they’re much farther along than you, they’ll recognise you and you might have a drink, and make a mentor. This is the most valuable relationship you will ever have. Your spouse can be replaced. Your mentor probably can’t .
That’s it. Bring on the hate.
I grew up poor, subsistence fishing, hunting, gardening. Later I understood that was a choice of my father’s. He made good money when he worked, he just preferred to be at home and work with his kids. Reflecting on it, when he needed to buy a new truck, he went to work for a month, bought a 1977 dodge crew cab new off the lot, went back to hunting lol.
I Always had a natural aversion to employment (not to hard work, just working under supervision) , probably a personality disorder I guess. I value the control of my time to an extremely high degree. I’ve been self employed / founder / investor 90 percent or more of my working life.
Ended up raising my first kid at the cabin for a few years. Eventually, in my early 30s, I started to have something you might call a bit of success.
As for how it helped? I’ve never paid rent or a mortgage in my life.(except short term/vacation rentals, hotels, etc, of course) I launched and crashed several businesses from there. Never felt like the end of the world, just the end of the day.
"Cheap", from what I'm currently seeing, starts at around $300,000 for a place like you describe. If you just buy raw land and try to build your own home, the county will either not let you, or it will end up more expensive than $300,000.
> You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again.
If it doesn't matter, you might as well not do it at all. Doing it again takes time in a game with a very limited amount of it. You can only do it again maybe 2-3 times in a lifetime. Maybe 4-5 if you have exceptionally lucky genetics.
Now $300k isn't that much, but it is going to be a barrier for a lot of average Americans.
I’ve launched or participated in at least 50 projects and pivots in my lifetime so far, almost exclusively failures. In the last decade and a half, my results are much, much better. For me, the issue was usually inadequate moat +poor funding or being a decade ahead of the market.
As for the cost of housing etc, stop thinking about houses. Start thinking about buildings. For the sake of all that is holy never build in a residential zoned area unless there is nonexistent enforcement or properly incentivisable inspectors. Housing is a racket of its own, with its own proper criminals and everything.
You can get a lot in New Mexico with nil property taxes and minimal controls for about a thousand dollars. G1 land in Alaska can be had for 4- 5 k and has no zoning controls at all.. It doesn’t need to be near a nice town. An hour to a reasonable town (100k population plus) is fine. Remember, it’s not your home. It’s a place.
I’m not talking about a place you want to live, I’m talking about a place you can live. As long as you can get water, some tumbleweed sandlot in the desert is fine, just cover it in cheap panels and buy the biggest AC unit you can. I prefer a woody place above 2000’MSL and not on any historical flood plain though. Also hurricanes and tornadoes are a big turn-off.
It doesn’t have to be in the USA either. In some ways even better if you have skills that allow remote work or platform work (oil rigs, mining, mercenary, contract Pilot, work camps).
You can build a structure that is liveable for about 50 a square foot. Shoot for around 600 square feet, like a ww2 era home. Bare plywood floors, Sheetrock, etc. If in other countries, use whatever the poor people use to build with. That will also offer some cultural protection.
If you can’t do it, in today’s market, for under 75k you aren’t trying. Just start with a small piece of land.
Maybe Tow and Park an (old) motorhome on it until your house is built. Get the motorhome running and sell it for twice what you paid if it’s not a total lost cause. Don’t ask me about split-rim tires though. I had to pay in (goods) to get one changed at an extremely sketchy tire place. I mean, really sketchy. I’ve spent some time in the 42 in Santo Domingo, and I’m telling you, this place, in North Pole, Alaska, of all the godforsaken places, was sketchy as hell. Just don’t bother.
If you get to North Pole though, see if Dirty-Neck Pete is still alive (no, really) because he has a junkyard with some astounding shit in it including the some of the infamous overland train, Soviet era relics, and a lot of other stuff that will probably eventually become a superfund site. He’s probably dead by now though.
In the meantime I'll enjoy the ride!
Learning to climb down the ladder after a lifetime of striving up it is a really hard mindset shift.
The author frames it as if you can just semi-retire and still have $200K a year which is observably and factually absolutely not true. Like the tired Hollywood trope of "I am done working hard, let's just go live at this beach-front property and work whenever we like and oh, by the way, money is not a problem ever and how the frak did we buy this beach-front property again?". Like the old Angelina Jolie movie: "Life or Something Like It" (2002).
Glad that the author has such a privileged life but most of us have arrived at this "wisdom" by 25 year old at the most and the depressing conclusion is that you have to keep grinding just to have this "little life". Because if you stop or even slow down, it's mostly homeless life that's awaiting you, not a little one.
If you're unfamiliar, this is an excellent introduction to this concept: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
It's extremely simple. It's boring. It's slow (but much faster than the alternative!). And it works.
Privileged people being blind to their privilege. Nothing new. My original point still stands then.
Keep finding stuff hilarious I guess, though.
But if you're making < $100k and suggesting you need $200k in passive income to go to a farmer's market, cook pasta for dinner, read library books, grow some plants, and drink the occasional wine? That doesn't inspire confidence that you have a great understanding of the value of a dollar.
I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that you came here to be snarky and tear down a straw man... one that doesn't exist.
I'm not going to bore you with my life story. But it has been an extremely bumpy ride and it's still not going well. Make what that info what you like. You'll probably say it's all my fault and I deserve it.
> The author frames it as if you can just semi-retire and still have $200K a year
I was just responding to that.
I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come. I recognize most people have much harder lives than I've had. I made some assumptions based just on your $200k comment above, and the fact that—let's face it—most HNers are making ridiculously large sums of money, and there is no end to these similar "this is impossible!" style comments on this page.
Truly, I'm sorry to hear you've had to deal with so much strife. Nobody deserves that. If you'd like to share more, my email is in my profile.
I'm sorry for making assumptions about your position. Last thing I want is to pile on someone already going through a hard time. I hope your luck turns around.
This strategy doesn't depend on amazing returns. If you save 65% of your income, and you currently have $0, you can retire in about 10.5 years (assuming fairly modest 5% return on investments). A 50% savings rate puts you at a 17 year career. It's the traditional "save 10%" retirement plan that really relies so heavily on the market going up long-term. The "live cheaply" strategy is infinitely more resilient.
For context, since 1900, the DOW Jones has returned, on average, 7.5% after inflation. And the S&P500 has returned ~6.5% adjusted for inflation. And in Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, he shows that throughout history, capital has generally returned around 5% (which, itself is kind of a problem).
But yes. The future is unknowable. There are countless things that could dramatically change these types of financial forecasts.
> In my most recent job, I earned $160k.
Yeah, ok dude. At least you were honest, I guess.
The formerly most pervasive myth in my culture required that in order to live a good life we should strive to treat others well.
Not many did it but it seems a good aspiration, to base my self-esteem on how I treat others rather than on how they view me.
could not have said it better myself… I quit all social media and I cannot even put in words how much my life has improved since then. not only in personal aspect of not being subjected of nonsense of social media but also my social life has improved immensely. my friends of course are all on social media and any discussion that relates to it that spills into our group chats I am like “no clue and don’t give two shits about it” - glorious existence!
2) the author did not capitalize "I" when referring to themselves like OP did
We might blame ee cummings, but it's a bit like blaming William Gibson for every cyberpunk affectation that appears today...
If it’s a simple matter like that, what ideas could other social media take from HN to improve?
If HN is social media, the term’s being used so broadly we’ll need something other term to refer to the kind of thing that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et c, are.
- no pictures
- no videos
- no adds
- no “for you” feeds
- not owned by US adversary (this is X, Facebook, TikTok (current and new one after the “sale”…) all are owned by people who do not care about Americans and work actively to destroy it)
- no personal shit like “look at my life, I won’t have money for milk but here is a picture from Hawaii
- insane shit gets easily flagged
- no influencers
- …
I'm usually averse to pointing out conflicts like you mention but there's certainly an sort of "internet culture" of playing the game of internet imagery and etc and ... decrying it / pining for something simpler / more fulfilling.
They know they can just go be simpler and give it a shot right?
People are full of conflicts so that alone isn't a surprise, but the scale of this seesaw on the internet feels weirdly large.
I sometimes think they mean that the people they see with all the "titles, achievements, influence" are not the people they like, and some simpler ideal is just the natural argument against them. Meanwhile ... they would rather be the folks with "titles, achievements, influence.".
Use it. Shit is unreadable.
I don't think it's a "very expensive mid-life retirement", to echo and paraphrase much of the criticism here. Yes, it could be, but it also doesn't need to be. Instead, it's about a mindset which says - I'm ok with going this far but don't feel the need to go a huge lot further.
We spent the weekend with friends. She is high up working for some US corp, doing maybe £250k a year. He's in something to do with governance that I don't fully understand, on maybe £150k+. They live in a stunning house, they have insanely busy jet-setting type lives, they have two small kids, two expensive cars, endless holidays abroad, several flats that they rent out, all the trimmings.
We had fun seeing them, and dipping into their life - but on the whole they seem to spend their lives being stressed, busy and not very contented.
My wife and I spent the journey home thanking our stars for our much simpler, much less glamorous, much (financially) poorer lives. We live by the sea, we have raised our (now late teen / early twenties) kids by choosing to be present, and this has come at the "expense" of our careers. We've run a small business working with non-profits for 15 years where we deliberately (in order to keep a sense of life balance) choose not to grow. My wife started a floristry business because she wanted something beautiful that was hers, but she has no ambitions to make it into something enormous and unwieldy.
We're in our late 40's / 50's - so I guess we partially fit the criticism, although we're far from retirement (lolz, not nearly enough cash to do that!), but on the other hand - we've always chosen to live like this. We had brief flirtations with big jobs in our mid-20's, and we had some hunger to climb a little bit up the salary pole early on, but we've both always been in and around non-profits and we've never had ambitions to be hugely wealthy or hugely successful, or hugely anything really. We just like ticking along, doing what we do, seeing some friends, writing a few songs and looking at bits of art along the way.
I do fully accept that there is a whole level of shitness in environments in which you have to hold down 3 jobs in order to make ends meet, and I also feel that the current environment is pretty scary for kids just entering the job market or at the beginning of their working lives. I'm under no illusions: I've been pretty lucky in my personal and working life. But I've also made this journey making quite a lot of conscious decisions that I think can be chosen (if you want to choose them!) along the way, not just when you're older or luckier or more comfortable.
You can sometimes choose (for example) to buy second hand, or to try not to take on debt, or to go for jobs that give you a better balance of time vs money. You can choose to do things cheaper. You can choose to be happier with less. You can choose experiences over objects.
Having no money is awful. But having a massive ton of it with all the complexity it brings - that can be awful, too.