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Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks.

The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel. When I look around at the sheer computing power available to us, I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation. So that we could focus on getting real work done in the sciences for example, instead of just making rent.

I've been living like someone from movies like In Time and The Pursuit of Happyness for so many decades without a win that my subconscious no longer believes that the future will be better. I have to overcome tremendous spidey sense warning signs from my gut in order to begin working each day. The starting friction is intense. To the point where I'm not sure how much longer I can continue doing this to myself, and I'm "only" in my mid-40s. After a lifetime of negative reinforcement, I'm not sure that I can adopt new innovations like AI into my workflows.

It's a hollow feeling to have so much experience in solving any problem, when problem solving itself will soon be solved/marginalized to the point that nobody wants to pay for it because AI can do it. I feel rather strongly that within 3 years, mass-layoffs will start sweeping the world with no help coming from our elected officials or private industry. Nobody will be safe from being rendered obsolete, not even you the reader.

So I have my faculties, I have potential, but I've never felt dumber or more ineffectual than I do right now.

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>I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks. The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel.

I suspected something very different based off the first sentence. Like someone living in a high crime area and trying not to get dragged into it. Or constantly struggling with poverty, food insecurity, etc.

I remember seeing a Ted talk on poverty impacting cognitive abilities.

A quick search returned some articles. Here’s one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7525587/

A Ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...

The other comments are great but I wanted to touch on why I seem to be struggling in a reality that generally provides enough today.

It's because as hard as it is to believe, especially for young people: life these days is decent despite the status quo, not because of it.

In other words, had we continued on the trajectory we were on before loosely 1980 and trickle-down economics, we could have had moonshots to solve each of humanity's problems in the order of need rather than profitability. We could have consulted academics to invent 25% efficient solar panels for under $1 per watt and had them installed on over 50% of homes by 1990. We could have invented lithium iron phosphate batteries at that same time and had $10,000 electric cars, because they simply aren't that complicated. We could have had blue LEDs, and WiFi, and flatscreens, and everything else we enjoy today, decades earlier. Stuff that doesn't even exist right now but should, like affordable public buffets, mass transit in small cities and single-payer/public healthcare. Robotic hydroponic greenhouses. Living closer to work (I know, inconceivable).

Instead, I had to watch everything roll out at a glacial pace under a risk-averse private system that allowed the Dot Bomb to happen around 2000. That defunded nearly all pure research and outsourced the jobs that provided a healthy work/life balance. That marginalized eBay businesses and online advertising and the resale market so that influencers and the ultra-wealthy could capture all of that low-hanging fruit while the rest of us have to work. And boy did I have to work, at jobs that sapped every bit of my passion, motivation and self-determination, leaving me too exhausted to pursue my side hustles fast enough to get to market before someone else beat me to it or a deregulated recession wiped me out again.

When you've watched progress flounder for as long as I have, it becomes obvious that sabotage is where the money's at. The powers that be denied innovation at every turn, in order to prop up aging industries centered around a 20th century fossil fuel economy that still dominates our lives today.

And now suddenly AI falls in our lap because a billionaire finally decided to fund it. Now you see what happens with a moonshot. Things change so rapidly that we're left reeling with their implications. The luddites come out. Politics devolves. Time runs backwards to the 1950s, the 1940s, the conditions that fanned the flames that turned into world wars.

Now they gleefully say "see! we should have kept stifling innovation! ignorance is strength!"

It's.just.so.exhausting.

I find that people fall very strongly into 2 camps, which could be loosely mapped to left and right: those who suffer knowing what could be, and those who defend what is to deny their own suffering.

> When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation.

I was inspired to get into programming by Star Trek in the early 2000s because I thought I could contribute to automation that would lead towards that kind of society; much like you've stated here. Some will say we're naive and unrealistic, but all the ingredients for having society function in this way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift. I was fine with the idea that society could take baby steps towards it, but it seems the last 25 years have been a mixture of regressing and small incremental improvements to things that don't contribute towards that goal. Just like you, my expectations have been utterly destroyed and my outlook for the future is grim.

The Star Trek future does seem out of reach. On the other hand canonically they only got to fully automated luxury space communism after fighting a global nuclear war against eugenisists.

In Star Trek, people do actually work and have responsibilities with little (or no) leisure time or say over how they spend their days.

In Star Trek money exists but there isn't much use for it because technology has made material abundance cost approximately nothing.

Star Trek doesn't show the 50 billion landwhales watching Netflix all day, because it makes for bad television. It shows the 1% who still work even when they don't have to, who work because they want to.

People very much have to work in Star Trek. If they don't, unsuspecting enemies like Q, the Romulans, or the Borg would eradicate the Federation's existence. They also have their own forms of scarcity. Replicators are somewhat common but Holodecks are not and members of the crew must schedule time to use them. Resource allocation is determined through the decisions of leaders in the beauratic hierarchy and the longer you watch, the more you see the ways in which the Federation falls short.

Most of the characters in Star Trek are in the military. That's pretty much part for the course.

> but all the ingredients for having society function in this way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift

It's awfully naive to think that you can solve the information problem with a "small cultural shift". Statements like this strike me as deeply ignorant of economics and the history of attempts to plan society. People are messy and their needs are hard to predict in any meaningful and responsive way that respects their preferences.

Imagine answering the question how many washing machines should we make. Assuming you could figure this out, you need to consider the different kinds of washing machines people may want and need. Apartment dwellers need small efficient one, and people with a lot of kids want big ones. This in turn has baring on the number of motors you have to make, feet of copper wire you need to product, plastics, rubber, and on and on. And don't forget that's just washing machines.

Now you need to figure out how to get these washing machines to people.

You just can't plan and automate everything, its far too complicated.

He's talking about automating labor, not economic planning.

It’s the same thing. Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away.

No it isn't. Using a script to automate a process frees me from having to carry out the process manually. It has nothing to do with central economic planning.

Most things in the world require physical processes. Automating those is quite a different task, and requires resources. How would you go about automating sewing a shirt? How about picking strawberries?

Again this is tech hubris and a lack of understanding of economics and history.

> Most things in the world require physical processes.

No one ever disputed that. The principle still holds if we apply this logic to physical processes; by automating or reducing the labor necessary to conduct a physical process, I can enjoy the benefits of the process without having to engage in the labor of the process.

> How would you go about automating sewing a shirt?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSu9Vcu0DU

> How about picking strawberries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gL6KC_W44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA9XnW6BV4

To respond to the edit you made to your comment:

> Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away.

This is true in the long run and I suppose the argument you are making is that any attempt to interfere with the present system of resource allocation will constitute a centralization that would be less effective than free market capitalism, so the notion that we could redistribute the surpluses generated by labor saving devices to the average person is inherently a call to economic centralization. This might be true, but I would propose an alternative reading:

The surplus of labor-saving devices has primarily accrued to the owners of these devices. You might then claim that these owners are owners because they have found a means of servicing a market demand. Each dollar they possess is a vote from the market that these guys really know what they are doing, and that the world wants more of it. If we were talking about spherical billionaires in a vacuum, I'd agree with you - but this issue is complicated by the compounding impacts of inheritance and its correlation with access to credit, as well as with the existence of competitive moats (e.g. network effects, intellectual property, sunk costs, natural monopolies, etc).

The optimistic read of the technology sector in the 2010s was that businesses would compete with one another to provide services that would ultimately improve people's lives. Instead, we got Windows 11. That wasn't a consequence of users voting with their dollars, it was a consequence of Microsoft entrenching itself into workflows that cannot be economically altered in the immediate future. There are lots of examples of the market not being particularly effective at economic allocation if we step outside of the logic that any purchase is a revealed preference which indicates approval of the good or service being purchased. Apply this logic to the purchases of gamblers, alcoholics, drug addicts, or murder-for-hire plots and the limitations of the logic become obvious.

No my argument is that trying at a broad systemic level to make specific outcomes happen is susceptible to the information problem. Trying like the op suggested to automate away work is utopian and improbable at best. If you squeeze labor out of one kind of drudgery you have no way of predicting the results, and you’re certainly not going to end up with Star Trek.

To my minor aside, look at that shirt. You have to essentially glue the fabric into a board and all the robot can do is a rudimentary set of side seams and sleeves on the tshirt. There’s no finishing work on the collar or hem so it’s useless. That robot exists as a demo and is used precisely nowhere. You could in theory do this, but it makes no sense economically.

And yes I’m aware of Japanese strawberry picking robots. You’ve clearly misunderstood what I’m saying. These thing may be technically possible but they remain infeasible for other reasons.

> No my argument is that trying at a broad systemic level to make specific outcomes happen is susceptible to the information problem.

This is exactly what I said you would say:

> I suppose the argument you are making is that any attempt to interfere with the present system of resource allocation will constitute a centralization that would be less effective than free market capitalism

Further:

> Trying like the op suggested to automate away work is utopian and improbable at best.

We are a long way off from the self-replicating systems that could feasibly make work effectively optional, but you haven't made a convincing argument as to why it is improbable that automation could reach that point.

> And yes I’m aware of Japanese strawberry picking robots.

You clearly were not aware of them or you would have picked better examples. Your original comment consisted solely of the statement: "It's the same thing." and now you're continuing with that flippant attitude by pretending that I'm misunderstanding your argument when I anticipated it in its entirety.

I clearly was aware of them. Do you think I just rattled of the bit about needing special glue to hold the fabric and only certain seam types being possible? There was a whole thing about these in the Economist last year and it was discussed on HN. While it’s technically possible you can’t deploy it. It turns out gluing an then applying solvents to fabrics doesn’t result in a product people want.

This Star Trek stuff is improbable because everything has to be coordinated somehow and waving your hand and saying magical future ai is the only proposal anyone ever has. So yeah, maybe super advanced AGI could do it, but probably not. We don’t even have good models now of how large economies work down to a granular level. People are like I said messy and respond in weird ways to their environments. The best we can do right now is working with prices as signals for the amount of effort other people are willing to put into something. And while that’s imperfect, it’s just improbable that we can do much better. Which is not to say that narrow objectives aren’t possible, only that the bigger and broader you aim the more impossible it becomes.

> I clearly was aware of them.

You cited them as examples of tasks that would be difficult to automate. The pickers have been commercially deployed for the last four years.

> This Star Trek stuff is improbable because everything has to be coordinated somehow and waving your hand and saying magical future ai is the only proposal anyone ever has.

Redistribution already occurs without the use of an AI.

> You cited them as examples of tasks that would be difficult to automate.

Yes because they are. I specifically gave an example where a machine exists but it's impossible to use for the real world, and an example where economics generally prevent adoption. That gets to my whole point.

> The pickers have been commercially deployed for the last four years.

Yes narrowly, and in only a few places where there are extreme labor shortages.

You are clearly misunderstanding me.

> Redistribution already occurs without the use of an AI.

I didn't make the claim that it didn't happen.

I feel like you're willfully ignoring what I'm saying. These things are hard and rolling them out universally often doesn't work because it is either impractical or economically infeasible to automate things or you run up against regulatory/cultural/material issues. The best we can do is piecemeal progress where incentives align.

> Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest.

Is there any evidence to back up this wildly huge assertion?

It should be obvious. There are plenty of thing we can build robots to do, but we don't because its wildly more expensive than we can sell the resulting product for. We can mostly automate construction but it turns out the land acquisition dominates costs, installation still ends up being sloppy and human, building codes are different everywhere, and people want a different kind of dwelling than what prefab is suited for at the moment.

If it should be obvious then the evidence should be equally obvious.

Or perhaps the world is a bit more nuanced and it may very well be that we're stuck in some local maximums that our current methodologies don't allow us to escape but escaping them is relatively easy if we chose to implement a meagre amount of resources for that purpose which is something we don't do because we're stuck in that local maximum and so on and so forth.

Another way of looking at what you're saying is that we're doing things optimally and that there's no room for improvement when that very obviously is not the case.

There are many gross inefficiencies in our system as it currently is -- look at food production for example. How much of the food produced globally is outright wasted? 30%? 50%?

If we made a conscious effort to tighten that up we could reallocate those resources to solving the problems of automation issues that you're describing.

The true hole in one for automation is a durable machine that can make a copy of itself as well as useful economic goods. Bonus points if this machine can be in a humanoid form to integrate into our existing economic infrastructure.

Once you have a self replicator you can have it make as many copies as needed to solve any problem you need with minimal human effort.

But a self-replicating machine isn't on anyones radar. Have you ever seen a politician or policy person discuss this?

I’m sorry, any talk about self replicating machines is just science fiction at this point. It’s not a serious thing to discuss as a near future possibility.

Hah, I wish that were the case. A whole lot more things would be automated if that were true.

Automation requires resources, but it also requires vision, cooperation among affected parties, a workable regulatory framework, maturity and availability of required solutions, and availability of competent integrators. There are all kinds of reasons something remains manual besides mere resource availability. And all those things change over time.

There's not much you can do about most of those things, but becoming a programmer and working to develop better solutions is one way to make a difference. Even if you don't work directly in automation, your work can trickle down to the people like me who do cencern themselves with automated sewing and strawberry harvesting.

What I mean by resources is the things you mentioned inclusive of vision.

I picked those two examples because you can literally build a robot to do it, but it is either unworkable in the case of the shirt or financially not viable like the strawberry robot.

Using your model, no technological development would ever occur because the fact that something had not happened yet would indicate that it could not possibly happen due to a lack of resources. This is the anecdote about two economists walking down the street and refusing to pick up a $100 because everyone knows that in an efficient market, someone would have already picked it up.

At some point the resources necessary for development are there but the technology itself has not actuated. This invalidates your original claim that: "Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest."

People came up with the information problem at a time when our ability to collect information and our computing power were several orders of magnitude inferior to what we have today. I don't think it's as big a problem as people think. Sure, it was true when every single person didn't have a device capable of instantly sending any kind of information to and from any location on earth, and when we didn't have the computing power to process that amount of information coming in 24/7. Now we do, so I believe a well functioning planned economy would be a possibility today, although it'd be a massive project to build such a thing. Even with limited technology the soviet union functioned for multiple decades and was one of the most developed nations on earth.

Milton Friedman's essay on making a pencil:

"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.

That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world."

https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/

Thanks. I'd wanted to search for this, but forgot who'd written it...

Thank you for that recommendation. Added this 10-hour documentary featuring Milton Friedman to the top of my to-watch list: https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/programs/free_to_choose/...

You're not the only one that has had those kind of feelings, and I really relate to the movies you referenced.

Try to remember, AI is a tool, not a solution, and there will always be new problems. There's a strong case that unlike every other time people said that technology will kill all the jobs, this time it actually will. But a helpful framework comes from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Solution (not the much more famous Innovator's Dilemma) - whereas a business has well defined needs that can be satisfied by improving products, customers (i.e. people) have ever evolving needs that will never be met. So while specific skills may lose value, there will always be a demand for the ability to recognize and provide value and solutions.

What makes a labor market for agents that recognize problems and provide solutions special or different from markets for other kinds of labor? If AIs get to a point where they dramatically outperform humans in other forms of labor, why not in this one?

I think some humans will be doing it well enough to keep themselves afloat the rest of our lifetime, and some will get fabulously rich building products as a one-man operation leveraging AIs. But there will be far more people failing at it. It will be like Youtube creators or Instagram influencers where there are few winners who take virtually all the rewards.

compared to the broadcast era aren't there way more winners -- with a smaller pieces of the pie -- nowadays?

it's still a Pareto distribution, I'm sure, but mega-stardom kinda died and was replaced by all these mini-stars, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure it supports your hypothesis.

Sure, there is some truth to this.

I'm not really in touch with other genres, but I like to watch chess videos/streams on Youtube and Twitch. The vast, vast majority of views and revenue are captured by about ten people.

I like those people too, but I've also watched a lot of smaller acts, even some amateur players not much stronger than me. So I get those recommendations, and I see their view counts. They aren't making anything at all.

There are other people who have some followers, but even 50,000 followers would be a dream for most people doing it and they will make next to nothing from that. I'd guess there are at least 30x the number of strong, titled players in the 50k group as there are in the 1MM+ group. These are all people who were chess prodigies as kids, won every scholastic tournament in their state, took gap years or went to colleges that let them basically major in chess, travelled the world for tournaments, with awe-inspiring skills, and they are not making anywhere close enough to live on.

And the thing is, I think software might even be tougher in twenty years. Its hard to get people to change from a system they use to another thing, much harder than recommending a new face on Youtbue.

Maybe someday they will. But the current run of LLMs are fantastic at regurgitating and synthesizing existing knowledge, and getting better all the time, but not so good at coming up with new ideas. As long as you keep to the realm of what is known, they can seem incredibly intelligent, but as soon as you cross that boundary there's a clear change - often to just meaningless bullshit. So, I personally don't think we're going to be outsourcing idea generation to LLMs (or AI in general) anytime soon. Though to be fair, I'm only about 75% confident in that, and even so, it doesn't mean they won't be hugely transformative anyway.

Pessimistically but realistically, it doesn't matter if AI will perform better, it just matters if it's cheaper. A historical example is all the offshoring of mission critical code starting in the late 90s, early 00s. The code that came back was sub-par many of the times, particularly for the cheaper shops, but the executives got their bonus for saving money and bailed out. The new executives are now in charge of fixing the disaster of a codebase that they were left with.

I think history will rhyme with the offshoring trend but with AI this time.

AI didn't really mesh seamlessly with my work until I used Claude, I highly recommend it. If your current workflow involves googling, reading documentation and examples on github until you can put together a solution then AI should slot into your work nicely. It just does all those things but faster and can often surface what I want in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes of research.

I wouldn't worry though, if the last 4 years are any indicator, we will continue to see LLMs refined as better and better tools at a logarithmic rate, but I don't really see them making the jump to replacing engineers entirely unless some monumental leap happens. If AI ever gets that good it will have replaced vast swathes of white collar workers before us.

I am somewhat optimistic, tech adoption is only going to go up, and the number of students pouring into CS programs is cooling off now that there aren't $100k jobs waiting for anyone who can open up an IDE. My ideal future is people who really love tech are still here in 10 years, and we will have crazy output because the tooling is so good, and all the opportunistic money seekers will have been shaken out.

I just want to say that, while I am about a decade your junior, I feel the same way.

It is weird to live in a world of shallow pursuits, wanting to learn and teach and build and seeing everyone going crazy about 'line goes up'. It also pains me the contortions that are required to afford to exist when we have so much wealth and knowledge and so many still have to suffer.

And the weird thing is, I see everything as learning. From fields learning to interact and persist 'particles' to ecosystems learning to dissipate energy to humans learning to collaborate. And we are literally building machines capable of learning. In a deeper sense, software is machine learning: general computers are the first machines we built that are pure learning potential. A loom can only make fabric but by making them capable of learning different patterns without the need of a human making every little decision we sparked a fire that is now consuming everything.

I don't think LLMs will shortcut software building. But I do think that existence itself is about learning. Seeing it hijacked by people obsessed with grabbing more resources for the sake of it is truly sad.

But then again, that is the root of suffering. Maybe what pains me the most is knowing how much I still hold on to in my own way. Maybe the best lesson I can take from all this is that the more I let go of the more I can lessen my suffering and participate in the great universal journey of learning. As a singer I greatly admired sang: if your cup is already full it's bound to overflow.

This is a rather simplistic view of life IMHO. What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries? What do you expect everyone to work on?

> What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries?

Many people are compelled to do that, but almost everyone wants more out of life. Strong evidence is that they take more whenever they can get it.

If you could get whatever you want out of life, right now, with no effort, what would you want exactly?

I'd travel the world, taking in diverse centers of culture, history, and nature. I'd try to learn new languages. I'd do more track days, karting, and Ultimate. I'd buy a shell and try to get back into rowing. I'd play more computer games. I'd play ping-pong, foosball, and board games with my kids. I'd coach kids' sports. I'd go to more plays and concerts. Even movies. I'd volunteer.

Of course I wouldn't do ALL of that, since even without work there are only so many hours in the day. But I certainly wouldn't want for things to do!

Some people do all that and still work, you probably just need better time management. You could study a language before work in the morning, and then go row for a bit. Then go to work. Then you could play computer games from 5 to 6, play ping pong with kids from 6 to 6:30, eat a dinner, coach kids soccer from 7 to 8, volunteer open source from 8:30 to 9:30, catch a movie at 10.

So simple! Just as easy to do it as saying it right?

Exactly, saying it’s the easy part.

But even without a job, you still need energy and motivation. The tax of switching between tasks (or hobbies) doesn’t magically disappear. Neither does the time suck of social media.

If you're wealthy and healthy, and even so only some of that timeline _may_ be possible, most just unrealistic.

>You could study a language before work in the morning, and then go row for a bit.

Ok, gotta be in by 9am, 30-60 minutes commute, 30 minutes learning a language, gotta eat, shower, coffee, get my row boat mounted and at the lake 20 minutes away, prep, do a 20 minute row, back again so realistically you'd need to be up at 6am, not unreasonable.

> Then go to work. Then you could play computer games from 5 to 6

Did you end work at 4pm or work from home, either way that is likely a short day but ok. A lot of people are forced to have commutes or work in a job that can't be remote, not to mention work much longer days. Hell isn't "60 hours is the sweet spot" for a work week now? (quoting Google's founder recent comments).

> play ping pong with kids from 6 to 6:30,

Have enough room to have a ping pong table at home, that must be nice, but yeah doable.

> eat a dinner, coach kids soccer from 7 to 8,

Who cooked dinner? Who cleaned up? That shit doesn't just happen by itself. So you prepped, cooked, ate and cleaned up, wrangled kids into car for soccer, and got the game field ready to play all in 30 minutes? Nope.

> volunteer open source from 8:30 to 9:30,

Game ended on time, kids didn't hang around to talk to team mates, straight in the car, no issues, and less than 30 minutes transport. Nope.

> catch a movie at 10.

30 minutes to get kids to bed, baby sitter on time (and you can afford one), doable at some ages sure. Movies are regularly 90-180 minutes so you're in bed at like 1am? For a 6am start? Again transport not taken into account.

The reason people think you can work 60 hours a week, every week, is because they don't do all the everyday things that need to get done, they have other people to do it. Also rarely do they leave enough gaps in their schedule for other peoples priorities.

Assume you WFH, 9 to 5. Commute time is zero. You have a middle class suburban house with a lake in the back. Your partner is a stay at home parent, does not work, just does household tasks and takes care of kids.

You wake up at 7. Quick 15 minute breakfast then push your kayak out to the lake and row 45 minutes on the water.

From 8 to 9, you can study a foreign language (same duration as a university course)

At 5 you can game for an hour and decompress. Then ping pong at 6.

By the time you finish ping pong with kids at 6:30, you’ve spent 90 minutes just playing around. Time for dinner, prepared by your partner. Kids have 25 minutes to get dress for soccer and eat dinner. The soccer field should be no more than 5 minute drive from your home.

After the game ends at 8:30, you could schedule an additional 20 minutes for your children’s frivolity if you like. Once you drive home you can cut down to 30 minutes working on open source stuff. A small sacrifice for their joy.

Send kids to their rooms by 9:30. Let them sleep whenever they feel like as long as they are quiet and in their room. Spend time with your partner and prepare yourselves for the night out.

By 9:45 the baby sitter arrives and you two head out for the movies. A baby sitter can be very cheap if your kids are older, often they are just a high school student doing homework or watching TV while your kids sleep or play. Don’t need a PHD.

You could be home by 1 AM depending on movie length. 6 hours of sleep is good enough, you can do it all again the next day.

It’s very doable, especially if you decide you don’t actually want to follow the same schedule everyday.

This schedule, even as a theory, assumes you work from home and have a partner who does not work and a babysitter? I don't actually know what percent of families that describes, but my guess is it's pretty low

Okay but at some point you have to make choices to work toward the life you want, it’s not just going to happen by accident with you chasing whatever you can, and that’s what people don’t understand.

If you want this schedule, prioritize a WFH career and find a partner who wants to stay home and earn enough money to hire a babysitter. If you don’t then this won’t be available to you and it’s your own fault.

> with no effort

I want effort, lot's of it, but let's not nitpick ...

Off the top of my head: Nobel Prize winning, world-beneficial research; lots of loving, open, deeply connected relationships; grow rapidly; be someone people turn to for support (because I help them), ...

I already do at least one of those things. :)

It is really besides the point because of the way the dopaminergic system works.

What was good enough yesterday is expected today and won't be good enough tomorrow.

That is practically what makes us human.

Whatever you get today with no effort won't be enough tomorrow.

The ideal modern life is really one that is challenging enough that you don't get everything at once but not too hard that you can't make progress.

I think if you let your imagination wander and you end up seeing the scale of potential we have and what we could really achieve, stuff like paying for rent and groceries starts to feel archaic and wasteful, or as some kind of artificial constraint holding us back as a species.

> What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries?

Why should people have to work to be able to afford rent and groceries?

Poverty is difficult enough to escape--not having to worry about rent and groceries would sure help.

There is a reason why school meal programs are such a success.

Well, even if we agree that's the best we can aim for as a species (how sad), soon we won't even have that luxury.

> What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries?

There's nothing wrong with people who have the ability to work for groceries being compelled to work for groceries. The rent issue is complicated by the fact that land ownership prioritizes those who have already had time to accumulate wealth over those who have not. There are some issues with abandoning prices on land entirely (e.g. if land has no cost, how do we decide who gets to live in the most desirable locations?), but there's a compelling case to be made that the contemporary system of real estate financialization is similar to the enclosure movement both in terms of its structure and impact. It becomes a question of those with good credit (typically the rich and old) being able to (in aggregate) buy up all of the desirable land and thus to set monthly claims on the income of those with bad credit over and above the level of claim that would be possible if the property purchases could not be financed by loans.

There is a legitimate cost to constructing a building and renting it out, but there is no real cost to land except the cost the market assigns to it. This might not be the worst thing (recall our example of allocating land in desirable locations), but when prospective landlords can take out loans against the property, the property's value is driven up beyond what any reasonable person would be willing to pay for the property's use. If you couldn't derive rental income from property, it would not make economical sense to finance these purchases beyond what you needed for your own use. This would (in theory) lead to lower prices.

Henry George is the figure to look at here.

I think (from personal experience) talking with a good mental health professional would really help with your current state of mind and the pressure you’re feeling.

Really? And how exactly?

"Just man up", maybe?

Sorry for the snark but I don't think they can just magically make you feel better. An example or two could change my mind.

> "Just man up", maybe?

That's the toxic stuff you get from society, which leads to you hiring mental health professionals that can teach you healthy, effective ways of dealing with stress.

This much I know and have heard. Still curious about some examples though.

Responding to your earlier comment, it's not magic and they don't do it, you do it. They help you learn how but it's up to you.

Every case is different. Therapists are brain debuggers. We don’t know what the bug is yet.

Look up "how to reduce salt" on YouTube. And remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy can help with a wide range of issues. If there are worries that are not productive for you, that you can't get out of your head, a therapist can teach you how to use some basic tools to control that. And you'll probably only need a few visits. You can also read books, but given what you've stated I think you should start with a human.

My son went to a few sessions and completely got his OCD under control. He doesn't have to go anymore. I used similar technique to quit smoking 30 years ago after at least a half-dozen serious tries by other means failed. Still off them. It applies to all kinds of issues though, its also very effective for depression. According to the literature studies I did twenty years ago, it was the only technique that actually showed sustained benefit for depression other than medication.

My depression comes from super severe learned helplessness. I have been extremely stupid with money and career choices and nowadays things got hard, I have several chronic health conditions and the difficulty got up not by 2x, more like 20x. I just can't muster the will to even do one job interview, financial reserves are dwindling fast and, you get the picture.

I have zero faith any therapist can help me. They'll likely start with "but it's for your own good!" and I'll just say "yeah yeah, like 200 other things I have been told and zero of them turned out to be true". That's how I imagine it.

I am not against paying professionals. Obviously. I just don't believe in therapy at all.

What would you do to start with, with a guy like me? (I am aware you are not a therapist yourself.)

I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and uncertainty.

Even in the language you used "severe learned helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not oriented to improving your condition.

You know you have a strong bias against therapists—given your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social species and evolved to live with strong connections to small groups.

Our society is no longer set up like that. So professionals like therapists and coaches provide the essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential nutrient that your diet lacks.

Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental health—the site Headway can help you find one that takes insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data before writing them off fully. The downside is a few hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and materially better future.

You have too much faith in the social system. Clue: I am in Eastern Europe. We have exactly zero protection. Not small. Zero.

TL;DR if my reserves dwindle, I get thrown on the street. No conditions. No if-s. No but-s. No social safety net. I become the next fresh bum on the street.

To more directly respond to your question: medical insurance in my case means I get to schedule a meeting 2 months from now, with an old-school psychologist who is going to look at me annoyed and badly hide the fact how impatient he is for me to leave. I heard stories from acquaintances.

I think its important to understand that CBT is a system, a set of tools for managing your thought patterns. Therapists who specialize in it are largely in the business of educating their clients, not having them lie on a couch and talk to the ceiling about their childhood. I'm not saying you won't have generic "talk-therapy" kind of conversations - those are still necessary for them to understand the specific issues you need to work on - but its not just someone helping you find insights that don't change anything.

If you are completely against meeting with a therapist though, you can start with books. I wish I could recommend one that I've used, but this is an example of one that looks really promising to me, with a practical approach: https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depress...

To try to complement what other replies already said...

I think an important result of successful intervention is to awaken (or reawaken) the mind to the idea that thoughts and perceptions are internal and not always accurate representation of an objective, external world. Much psychological stress comes from these internal experiences, and subtle shifts in your mental posture can change this environment.

That's not to say that real stressors and stimuli don't exist. It's just that often times a person can spiral in a way that makes their internal reactions counterproductive and harmful to well being.

Another important result is learning better coping and adaptation strategies, so you can start to shift your mental posture or even change lifestyle and environment to reduce chronic stress.

It's not always easy, not magic, and not perfect. But, it can help...

The worst thing here is, from the beginner perspective it seems like simply reframing bad in a positive way, when bad was almost completely in their mind and didn’t exist that much. After the results you can see how twisted you were. I had my moments when I looked at the scheme of my mind on a whiteboard and had to admit how delusional I am, with zero pressure to do so.

That's most likely what's going on with me as well. Working hard to undo it but to say it's hard would be a laughably weak understatement.

This is not how therapy works. Although, tbf, it’s not hard to find a pseudotherapist who practices stereotypical bs.

What would you do to start with, with a guy like me

IANAT either, but mine would start with asking how I feel and then why. Then we’d talk about my vision of practical ways to stay afloat, the ways I maybe don’t see due to my focus, what exactly makes it hard to push through, in both known and never-tried situations. There would be some belief, avoidance, anxiety, algorithm, or a set of these. In CBT there’s a clear formalized method for each, which you can pick and work with until the next week or two. Examples are: logging your emotional responses, compiling a list of “musts”, start doing un-usual things, asking what exactly is wrong with something that seems bad.

That is, if my depression was on low. If on high, we’d address that first. Last time I pushed through it by following physical regime, a few supplements and lots of anger against it (depression can’t turn off my anger, ymmw as well as methods).

the canonical book recommendation for CBT is Burns:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeling_Good:_The_New_Mood_T...

How do you know someone is a European? They think therapy and mental health issues are a silly American "trendy" fixation.

Trust me, us Europeans are not exempt from the "everyone should see a psychologist" trope blasting social media the last decade. We are not blind to every Hollywood actor having a personal therapist either.

I think the main difference (speaking as a northern European) is that when you Americans speak of therapy you seem to mean the stereotypical "talk therapy" where as basically every therapy here is cognitive behavioral therapy.

Can cognitive behavioral therapy help someone who has a bit of existential dread about his tech job? Maybe. I don't think it's silly on it's face though to say "really?" if the poster's life is in order otherwise.

Perhaps your life is on the easy setting? Hungry people work really hard. Fearing destroying an entire family by losing my job allows me to find strength and courage.

As a researcher who changed career paths to teaching at a community college, I empathize. Twenty years ago when I graduated from high school, I was inspired by the stories I’ve read about Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and early Apple and Microsoft. I wanted to be a researcher, and I wanted to do interesting, impactful work.

Over the years I’ve become disappointed and disillusioned. We have nothing like the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of old, where researchers were given the freedom to pursue their interests without having to worry about short-term results. Industrial research these days is not curiosity-driven, instead driven by finding immediate solutions to business problems. Life at research universities isn’t much better, with the constant “publish-or-perish” and fundraising pressures. Since the latter half of January this year, the funding situation for US scientists has gotten much worse, with disruptions to the NIH and NSF. If these disruptions are permanent, who is going to fund medium- and long-term research that cannot be monetized immediately?

I have resigned myself to the situation, and I now pursue research as a hobby instead of as a paid profession. My role is strictly a teaching one, with no research obligations. I do research during the summer months and whenever else I find spare time.

> I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation

What you stated is true, but my disappointing observation is that the people with wealth/power are only marginally smarter than the rest of us on the topic you mentioned. And then I suspect that even if one had a rich benefactor, pulling that off is not easy. It takes a threshold number people who have a holistic view of things to pull of what you mentions i.e nearly free basics of life. Check my profile etc. - some of what I wrote may strike a chord with you.

Also the proponents on Technocracy (Hubbert etc.) about a 100 years back, essentially touched on the subject you state. Note: The word technocracy today has a different connotation.

I'm very sympathetic to your experience and agree with most of what you say, but as someone who has spend half his life in academia and half outside, "who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel", I must say that 'reinventing the wheel' is at least as prevalent in academia than it is in business.

> acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime

For some perspective, bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians showed that they regularly suffered from famine. There was also the constant threat of warfare from neighboring tribes.

The American colonists didn't fare much better, their bone evidence was one of extreme overwork and malnutrition.

I agree, you said some things I feel for some time too.

Hi zackmorris,

If I may so bold as to refer to you as "my friend" (having never met you)...

My friend, I think I understand what you mean. I am about the same age too.

I would like to propose an idea to you - and it is something I have been exploring very deeply myself lately.. maybe the thing we need to start spending our time on is exactly this meta problem now. The meta problem is something like (not perfectly stated): we as humans have to decide what we value such that we can continue to give our existence purpose in the future.

I don't think AI is going to be the be-all-end-all, but it is clearly a major shift that will keep transforming work and life.

I can't point yet at a specific job, or task - but I am spending real time on this meta problem and starting to come up with some ideas. Maybe we can be part of what gets the world, and humans, ready for the future - applying our problem solving skills to that next problem?

I mean all of the above in 100% seriousness and I am willing to chat sometime if interested to compare notes.

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