Comment by Unbeliever69 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Unbeliever69 | Hacker News Reader

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Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income.

Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us.

Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.

Whenever I read something like this I have to ask if kids are in the picture? Or maybe they've already moved away.

I'd like to do something like this but everything that has to do with kids is both too expensive and too unpredictable for lean living to be an achievable goal.

It’s a very common arrangement, both with and without kids, once you look past the gender of particular participants.

It's very common for a teacher's salary to pay the expenses of two adults and 2+ kids?

I guess it must be nice not living in high col areas.

Whenever you see something like that, remove USA from the bias, and you probably better understand how stupid the USA is.

Given paid off debts and frugal lifestyle (as mentioned by the OP), why not? No one keeps anyone hostage in the high CoL areas.

There can be a lot of factors at play:

- how old are they? If the poster is ~60, likely has savings and may even have Social Security income. If they worked as (say) a police officer for 20 years, they may have pension income. A 47-year-old former military officer could reasonably have kids at home and also pension income from the military.

- Many people inherit houses (most houses are eventually inherited). Most sell them, but it can be a viable choice to just move into an inherited house to zero out housing expense. OR one could inherit a house that is >> valuable than one's own, such that selling the inherited house allows one to pay off one's own house.

- Location. The Discourse typically divides between HCOL and LCOL, but ignores that in both there are also people who spend much less than the average. In NYC the average home price is ~$850k, but there are today listings for 3BR homes in the low $200s (<$1,500/mo).

And of course these are stackable. One could have a military pension and buy a cheaper place and have a buffer from an inheritance. (None of this is uncommon.)

they said "teacher" but also mention writing grants. A high school teacher isn't writing grants, their wife could be bringing in a lot more than the typical teacher.

A tenured position in a reasonably good university can give you quite a good standard of living, and depending on your area, there are even opportunities for occasional consulting work.

Not to mention that the professional prestige itself in an academic profession gives your family a lot of status that other people usually try to attain by buying expensive stuff.

Even in the fanciest neighborhoods, nobody cares if a Princeton Professor drives a 20 years old Volvo.

> In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.

Are you financially better off or does it only feel that way?

If you were actually better off, why mention feelings?

They may have less money but also more time for things they care about, and less burden and stress in daily life.

So it is going to be a feeling. Is their smaller income going much farther now in how it benefits them, if so they feel better-off

That seems non-financial.

On some level the feeling matters more than the reality, past a certain survival threshold.

I think the heart of what they're getting at is that while on paper they are bringing in less income, they have gotten off the hedonistic treadmill, and as a result, quality of life per dollar has increased dramatically. They are less stressed about finances than they were prior, even though their income is lower.

Sentiment is an important barometer in this case.

But how long until your wife replaces your job with AI?

Wonder what you'd do with your passion in a just world where everything of creativity (okay almost) would not need to be turned into a income.

I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard.

How sorry can life be?

We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting. Until we have very highly capable robots to do these jobs, we need some way to incentivise doing work which few others want to do, or are capable of doing. Right now we use money as the incentive. On top of that, there are things people do which bring a lot of value to others. They invent new things, for example, and sell them. Others buy them. We also want to incentivise that, even though it's not easy, and not everyone is capable of doing that.

I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.

Alternatively, you live in a society that has conditioned you to devalue manual labour and erronously assume that no one exists who actually enjoys physical interaction with the world.

As you're likely to be in the US, you could always watch the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs back catalog.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_(2006_film)

That's true for some jobs, but I'd be very surprised if anyone enjoys cleaning shit, for example

Leaving aside the scene from Life of Brian, I have no issue cleaning shit - I've raised children, they poop, I have livestock, they shit, kids will happily frisbee cow pats, raking out sheep shit from under shearing sheds is a job that I've done, as have many .. you end up with a couple of tonne stacked high on a double axle trailer that's great for the garden.

For what it's worth, I don't mind a bit of higher dimensional data reduction when processing raw multi channel data, or geophysical world modelling (magnetic fields, gravity, radiometrics, etc).

I'm heading to the Graeberian world of bullshit jobs which ironically tends to head towards the direction of meaning.

I'm pro "everyone cleans their own shit" but the meaning of a garbage truck driver could immense compared to a honest hedge fund manager or a VC Patagonia vest.

Cleaning time of our own shit hopefully won't be a full time job. We'll just figure out the ones creating too much shit and educate them as a society :D

It can be enjoyable in the context of failure analysis: troubleshooting, finding root causes, documenting other people's fuckups then tracing through the assignment logs on who interacted with the server last.

> Alternatively, you live in a society that has conditioned you to devalue manual labour and erronously assume that no one exists who actually enjoys physical interaction with the world.

I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that the same number of people would be interested in wiping butts and fixing mains lines in snow storms if they weren't paid for it. To me this seems unbelievable and naive on its face, but I'm willing to keep an open mind if you have some evidence.

I generally think people who believe these jobs would be done without some kind of incentive have never worked them before. They suck. Sometimes jobs really do suck, but they still need doing.

By someone you mean... yourself?

That's just it: I am only one man. I can't fix everything myself. That's why I pay others to do stuff I'm not good at, or can't do.

Jason Pargin has a great viewpoint on this: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1179783609733134

Apologies for a fb reel, but its the easiest way to share.

Great video. Thanks!

>> We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting.

>> I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.

Delusional optimism. If AI and robotics take over, the only effect will be another wave of layoffs and unemployed, not even the willingness to unblock toilets or wipe butts will save you from homelessness and destitution. We're already on the way to Victorian era poverty, if robots take the shit jobs too, we're back to Oliver Twist: please sir, can I have some more ... tokens?

Given how we handled the industrial revolution and more recently, the destruction of Midwest industry in Chinese offshoring, you may very well be correct. People will cheer cheaper products and services while watching unemployment rise around them.

However if it happens so fast, and so many of us are impacted, I have to believe that will impact how we vote.

How many acres are you personally willing to farm to let others eat without payment “in a just world”?

How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?

It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…

The slavery comes with not being paid in proportion to the value provided.

> In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…

This sounds a lot like you've been conditioned to think there can't be an alternative to the current system. Even if I don't know what a better system would be, I can absolutely imagine that there are better options than what we've got. We should all want that and push for that and ask ourselves what it might be until we find it.

I can tell you this much about what I think would be part of that better system: we wouldn't leave people to sleep on the streets and we wouldn't have for-profit healthcare.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Assuming that a farm would be owned by one person has already put a very tiny box around your world view

My comment makes no assumption whatsoever about the ownership of the farm. It only talks about the labor of farming, not the capital.

Perhaps it is your own point of view of seeing everything as an ownership problem that has you looking out from inside a too-small box.

> I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard

I think you'd do well to learn more about how slaves were treated before making these comparisons. Have you been whipped until your flesh opened and had salt, lime juice, and peppers rubbed in the wounds because you messed up at work, where you are also forced to lived?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Thistlewood#Treatment_o...

no, but i once had my catered lunch taken away during a recession /s

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