What It's Like to Fail | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Fail

priceonomics.com

After reading the article, I just realized that there are two kinds of failures: succeeding and subsequently failing, or just failing outright. He managed the first but I've only experienced the second.

The major takeaway from the article is that he fell into the same trap that a lot of us did in the 90s, that the future was so bright you had to wear shades. I had no idea the 2000s were going to be so dang BLEAK.

Now we have a two-tier economy where the companies making money make a lot of money and everyone else makes small money. We also have saturation in just about every market, filled by people who have recognized the small money and rejected it for the suffering it requires. And then we have the rest of the world coming up, so that it's more difficult to stand on others's shoulders and skim income from their labor (a good turn of events in my book). I don't know what all of this means or what the future holds. All I know is that if we rely on the free market to figure all of this out, the future is social darwinism. We'll have billions of souls struggling to find food and shelter instead of contributing their unique gifts to the betterment of humanity.

All I know is that if we rely on the free market to figure all of this out

The government creates bubble after bubble causing enormous amounts of economic dislocation in the housing market, college loans, healthcare, and on and on... and your conclusion is that somehow the free market is the problem or at very least not the solution?

contributing their unique gifts to the betterment of humanity

No system throughout history has ever contributed more to the "betterment of humanity" than the free market.

As with so many things, Friedman said it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

> The government creates bubble after bubble

You can't make a statement like this and use it as a premise for something else and not expect to have to defend it as a statement unto itself. Given this is an extreme position you're going to have to have an extremely good argument for it for anyone to take it seriously.

But assuming that the government does cause all "bubbles", why is it understandable that during such times market participants should start behaving irrationally, against their own best interests? Markets can solve anything, except bubbles caused by the government?

This is trivial. Not sure anyone needs to debate it. Latin american debt crisis. Peso crisis. Asian currency crisis. Russian currency crisis. Nasdaq bubble. Telecom bubble. Housing bubble. And current "QEx" bubble accross all asset classes from farmland, to Gold, to Art to Bitcoins, to London Real Estate ... {etc WTF?}. Markets need regulation, rules, and governing oversight. Without those, they are crap. Without those and mypoic distortion they are even worse. The problem is that there is money to be made from advising the government to "intervene" and its a good business model. 1/3 of the us economy is spent by politically motivated non-market entities. But the real damage is done by corrupted financial markets, another large proportion of the GDP. Just look where the money is going. As the suburbs of Washington overtake New York as the highest income counties in the US. There shouldn't be a question at all: A nexus of crony capitalism has emerged in the past 12-15 years.

I'm not sure I get this? This seems to be "Governments control outsized amounts of cash and make bad decisions, for which well financed private markets exploit their bad positions sucking at the tax money and eventually a crisis occurs ending the situation till another political arbitrage occurs."

it's just that a lot of the crises listed are to me less "political corruption and collusion with financiers and more the road to hell being paved with good intentions. ending political corruption is feasible, ending good intentions?

Try something like "Government has outsized power to change economical outcomes, and punishes sustainable decisions hard, making any rational person choose the viable unsustainable ones. People that make unsustainable decisions (everybody still in the game, as the government destroyed everybody else) can't sustain themselves for long, and routinely face deep crisis". I guess that's a bit longer, but more clear.

Things would be less bad if just one unlucky event in a crisis wasn't enough to destroy the entire life of somebody, but it is, so we must play russian roulette every few years.

Anyway, I'm quite sure reducing the government intervention will replace this problem with something worse (that we can check on history books), thus the solution has to come from some other kind of change.

ending political corruption is feasible

Wow, I'm not really sure what to say to that unless you mean that you can end political corruption by destroying the power base of government so that taking advantage of government doesn't mean much.

My Homeowners' Association doesn't really have any significant corruption, but that's really just because they don't have much power or money to control.

Whenever you concentrate large amounts of power, you will have corruption. That is as axiomatic as any part of life on Earth.

How did the government create the Dot-com bubble?

The legal structure that replaced pensions with 401k's and the like is considered the main source of the bubble. It isn't a coincidence that the dot com bubble happened right as all the baby boomers were hoping to retire.

The dot-com bubble was late 90s very early 2000s. The established dates of birth for the baby boomer generation are from 1946-1964. In the year 2000 this puts the age range of the baby boomers from 36-54 years old. That means none of the baby boomers were retirement age. So I'm not sure how your explanation of them retiring is correct?

36-54 is exactly the years that you will be told by everybody you know to go to a financial planner and "get serious about retirement".

Most people do their investing before they retire.

I have never heard that 401ks caused the bubble and would love to see more than one source that says this.

Before the 1970's most professionals and union workers had fixed-benefit pensions run by large corporations, supervised by accountants with very serious looks on their faces. As 401(k)'s became common for normal workers, instead of just perks for C*O's, all of a sudden their was a massive influx of money into the DJIA and NASDAQ, just as the baby boomers "save for retirement", mostly influenced by people like Jim Cramer and other dancing-finance-clowns.

Also notice that the housing crash happened just as all the baby boomers' children go off to college and they decide to down-size from their McMansions since they are empty-nesters now.

Thirdly notice how now medical expenditures nationwide are climbing greatly now that they are all becoming old and sickly. The next 10-15 years are a great time to be in the medical field, even with ObamaCare. But then as they die off it will be a horrible place to try to get a job.

You think all of the benefit money wasn't in equity markets before 401ks came about? You are taking one potential impact and over exaggerating in every case, but especially in your housing bubble theory.

The baby boomers are a major demographic event, and those will always have economic impact.

I would love to see a mix of new versus old homes sold from 2001 - 2006. If more than 60% are old, then you might have a leg to stand on, but you are probably wrong.

How did the government create the derivatives bubble? Seems like the exact opposite happened: the government massively deregulated things, then just a few years later there was a bubble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization...

Since the bubble burst, what corrections has the free market made to prevent there isn't another one?

So much of the rhetoric about "free markets" seems to come from looters who resent the government eliminating ways to make money by rent-seeking, collusion and fraud rather than producing useful goods.

(edit: fixed link)

what corrections has the free market made to prevent there isn't another one?

What does the free market care about bubbles? We've seen time and time again that the free market optimizes for "this quarter", not "this decade". If it means a crash a year from now, so what, let's just be sure to enjoy the ride and try to skim what we can before it hits!

There is a possibility that the real interest rate that would force the market to full employment is negative, and therefore speculative bubbles and/or high inflation are the only ways we can currently achieve full employment. Paul Krugman has written a lot on this subject:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/secular-stagnati...

The ironic thing is that he's a massive outlier: the career he succeeded then failed in was comedy writing, an area where most people "succeeding" are pretty much living on the breadline anyway[1], whilst the vast majority only experience failure. And virtually none of it's down to the economic cycles that affect everyone else! He seems to have fallen so fast because he was so successful: he was rejected for being "too expensive" because he'd been so well paid on previous assignments, perhaps took those rejections rather harder than those more accustomed to them and didn't have the willingness (or perhaps the contacts and early-career experience) to fall back on writing advertising jingles, or humorous radio snippets, or co-writing on a large team, until eventually he was so out of touch with the industry Craigslist was his best option. For the majority of aspirant comic writers, Craigslist is the best option they'll ever get to earn a living doing it. Then again, half of them don't write stuff people want to watch...

[1]for comparison, in the UK, "success" as a comedy writer is getting the equivalent of $8,000 per episode total to write a standard six episode series which makes it onto BBC, and then getting another set of six next year before your show gets cancelled. Needless to say, you can earn less from radio, or co-writing, and most comic writers that aren't also actors have other income sources (and smaller families)

Hm... that makes me wonder what the key motivation for them to accept so low a level of expected economic reward would be... any insight?

I would think it would have to be passion for the job.

>The major takeaway from the article is that he fell into the same trap that a lot of us did in the 90s, that the future was so bright you had to wear shades. I had no idea the 2000s were going to be so dang BLEAK.

I don't buy this. He knew that writer's jobs rarely lasted into their 50's. He knew the end was coming but didn't save enough, and continued to spend 400k per year while being unemployed.

What happened to agricultural commodity prices in the Roaring 1920s began happening to almost human labor (except high-end private-sector social climbing) around 1998.

Badly managed plenty (in the '20s, in food; in the '90s, in services in general) leads to a catastrophic depression. If excellence-maximizers are in control, people see better uses for the freed-up resources. But the ones who succeed in human organizations tend to be the boring cost-cutter type, and if those sorts of people are in control, then growth (paradoxically?) leads to meltdown and widespread poverty.

So, oddly enough, the thing that bothered me the most about this article was the way his wife left him. I read stories like this a lot online, where two married people are prospering and living happy lives, and then despite the vow they made for "better or worse", one just gives up on the other person when times get hard.

Is it really that easy?

I'm currently 23, and if/when I ever get married, regardless of who brings in the income (both of us, just me, or just her), I would support whoever I married even if they lost their job or had some other hardship. You hear about people getting cancer or some other sickness and their spouse leaving them because they don't want to deal with it. It boggles my mind that these things occur.

If you weren't going to truly commit to the person, why would you get married? Just live together instead. Or get married without saying the vows if you just want the government benefits. I don't understand.

It's not just limited to spouses. It sounds like some of his children could have supported him as well. If something happened to my father, I would do everything I could to take care of him, regardless of what it cost me.

I'm curious of other HNers take on this. Has anyone been in a situation like this?

>> Is it really that easy?

I don't know. I do know that marriages break up for many reasons, not all of them obvious to outsiders (or even one or both insiders). Do you think that the wife, who had spent the last n years raising eight children, had any skills that would get her a job bringing in enough money to keep both of them going?

Well, in summary, I don't think there are many ex-poor people posting on HN.

The primary problem is he had too much hope. If he knew it was going to come to this, cashing in the chips earlier and moving out of the house ASAP would have been much better off financially than letting the house drain his net worth to zero at which point it couldn't drain any more.

Part of that hope is he still saw (still sees?) himself as a wealthy comedy writer and he might get hired as a local... but not if he's living in Germany as a house-husband. So to move away he'd have to give up hope, which he apparently refused to do. Ever.

Now the wife's "skill" was in having German citizenship. So she comes from a more civilized country where she doesn't have to sleep in a '97 minivan and can occasionally eat. So she pretty much has to go there and take the smallest of the kids with her. As an economic refugee or whatever. I've occasionally considered if I absolutely had to (like, ultimate worst case scenario) I'd become an economic refugee and move to a more civilized country, like Canada. I actually have enough "points" to immigrate legally, for that matter. Depressing as this sounds (because it is depressing...) as my elderly ancestors are dying off, I literally have fewer reasons every year to stay in the USA. So an upgrade is likely in my future.

You have to do what you have to do to keep the kids alive, and that means the wife is moving to Germany with the little kids, and he is staying in CA in the wild hope that he will get back in the biz. And long distance relationships being what they are...

>>Do you think that the wife, who had spent the last n years raising eight children, had any skills that would get her a job bringing in enough money to keep both of them going?

You make it look like a profit-loss statement, in which its acceptable to walk out of a deal if its not profitable.

If that's the standard in a relationship, do you know the most dangerous part? Marriage doesn't make any sense for any man from that perspective. Marriage helps women more than it helps men. The man works all his life, like this guy worked 17 hr/day every day. Only to find when things get a little low, the wife will go to another man.

He might as well not get married, keep the money from his work for himself.

Indeed. A lot of men are coming to this realisation, and a lot of women are too ("Man Up!"). It'll be interesting to see how society handles it.

I replied to a comment by someone describing himself as 23 years old. I have been married longer than that, and thought it not impossible I might know more about marriage than he does. I wished to raise a couple of points; I don't know whether repetition and amplification will help, but here goes:

1. Marriages fail. Over, as the epigram says "Nothing of importance:/Nothing but money, sex, and self-importance."

2. The writer judged that he could not keep a roof over his family's head; he moved to his van, his wife in with a couple of their daughters. In my view, her primary responsibility at that point was to the well-being of the children, and she seems to have made a sensible decision. Do you know that the older daughters could have accommodated two sisters, a mother and a father? If not, on what grounds do you blame her? I really don't see what profitable deals have to do with this.

3. 17 hr/day. Yes, in the job he dreamed of, writing for a sitcom. I've worked with people working 17 to 17 hours a day, half of it cleaning motels and the other half not much more entertaining or glamorous. The two cases do not seem comparable.

4. "A little low ... another man". They had no house, and the wife was long separated when she met someone else, back in Germany.

I'm 30, and while I have never considered leaving my wife, I have been through some soul-crushing shit. The kind where you sit on the third story of a parking garage ledge contemplating options.

During that time, I never considered it leaving my wife, as my life insurance policy covered suicide and would've left my wife financially secure forever ($1MM+).

I hope you never have to experience such despair, but having been there, I can see how people decide to split even if married. When things are at their darkest, nothing is off the table.

Hope you are living better times now.

Much better. Thank you.

Last time I crunched the numbers, $1M will provide security but probably not indefinitely sustainable income. If you manage 6-7% in the stock market, that's $60-70k/year, but 6-7% is the decade-over-decade average. Any one given year can be 1% (or even negative).

$10M on the other hand provides solidly middle-class income even in years of terrible market performance.

Home and vehicles were paid off; my wife is frugal and we live in a low-cost area. It would've supplemented her income from her mid-20's until retirement.

Also, getting a $10MM policy is a lot more difficult than a $1MM policy.

All perfectly true, and I agree that $1M is more that sufficient as supplemental income.

Edit: You were 30 and you owned your home free-and-clear? Good show!

Thank you!

Marriage isn't easy, and we have no idea what is being glossed over in this excerpt. We don't even know if his family was supporting him in other ways (meals/doctor's appointments when he visited, money sent, etc).

It'd be interested to read the book and see just how 'casual' the wife's departure was--I'm guessing after 8 kids it wasn't.

That's a good point. There could be another side to the story we're not hearing. (I updated my post to remove "casual").

Divorce rates are easily googlable. From it, you can extrapolate that your ideals are not shared by your countrymen. You can wonder if they lack moral fibre, or if you lack experience.

You can wonder if they lack moral fibre, or if you lack experience.

Or perhaps both, as in moral fibre is an illusion brought on by lack of experience (i.e., is largely due to the fundamental attribution error)?

>>You can wonder if they lack moral fibre, or if you lack experience.

False dichotomy.

>one just gives up on the other person when times get hard.

That's a pretty simple summary. You don't go from prosperous to poor without a lot of stress and frustration, and that can change people, usually for the worse. If your partner used to be very loving, and spend time with you, and now is working all the time, and angry at the world in general, and lashes out at you for not doing something trivial, and you fight all the time... at some point you just move on.

Frankly, he has two working-age daughters, yet apparently neither will support him until he gets some kind of job. It doesn't say much for the family dynamic...

Like mother, like daughter?

My other half said to me one day early in our relationship, as I was facing brancrupcy due largely to my business partner....

"I don't care if we live in a tent if I'm with you."

I recounted that line to her when I proposed years later.

That's great to hear!

Words are cheap. People, things, circumstances, beliefs, ideals all change with time.

Wow, that wasn't the most cynical thing I've ever heard at all.

It's cynical to say that people change? This is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. If you prefer to live in a cocoon don't expect HN comments to comply with your worldview.

Mary Doria Russell put it memorably (for me) in this quote,

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/417319-we-all-make-vows-jimm...

It's longer, but here's one part. The speaker is explaining being married 4 times to 4 different men (each named George--the "same" person).

"Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people. . . . Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever."

Wow, you consider that cynical? I guess you don't have much experience of life. I've probably got a lot more, and what you found cynical, I found obvious.

After over 20 years of marriage, I have found that every few years I realize that I'm married to a different person than I was. So is she. Some changes are for the better, some for the worse. In both of us. But I know that if I could talk to myself on my wedding day and honestly describe to that young man what his future would hold, he'd have never believed it possible.

Here are some tips for you. If you get married, planning on remaining the same people, you're setting yourself up for your divorce after the discrepancy between who you are and who you pretend to be gets too large. If you get married, planning on holding to an ideal of marriage that you see written for someone in a book, well, there is a reason that evangelical Christians have a significantly higher divorce rate than atheists. If you get married and depend on belonging to a community/belief system that makes divorce not an option, you will create a hell for yourself on Earth - as several ex-Catholics of my acquaintance would be happy to testify. (I know plenty of current Catholics who would privately agree.)

The only way that I know of to be married a long time, and be happy, is if you both work on growing together, and changing in the same direction. You have to take the possibility of failure seriously to even have a chance of success. And even so, it is only a chance. You don't always grow together. Some changes simply can't be reconciled. You think this impossible? Here is a random example. I know multiple people whose spouses realized that they were gay after marriages lasting over a decade. You tell me how a marriage can survive that. I can't, because the ones I know about didn't.

You probably think that I am saying something horribly hateful. That's fair. I remember being outraged after 5 years of marriage when my older sister commented, "You're still in the easy part." But she was right, and I was wrong. I was, I just didn't know it.

Seriously, unless you've been married more than 10 years, I don't think that you can possibly have enough experience to base an opinion of your own on. If you make it to 20 years, I dare you to tell me that I am wrong. If you can accept my dare at that point with a straight face, I would be willing to bet money that you are living in denial. (I've watched people go through that as well. It is not a nice thing to watch the illusions that someone's life is based on crumble...)

Why is this? It is because ten years together is not simply one year repeated ten times. It is ten times the accumulated differences, experienced for ten times as long. That's 100 times as hard.

You've made an interesting post; however, I would like to add some of my own insight, which could help explain why I made my original post about being bothered that his wife left him.

My parents were happily married for 17 years before my mother passed away from cancer. They had an essentially perfect, idealistic marriage. They never argued, they retained their same values/morals from the day they were married, and they were truly each other's best friend. I could tell both of them enjoyed each other's company immensely and unwaveringly. Maybe their personalities changed a little over time, but all of their important core values remained constant.

Is this a common occurrence? Not at all. I'm sure we can both agree on that. But from my perspective, as someone who grew up witnessing this kind of marriage, the fact that I know such a thing is possible means I would try hard to replicate it for my own family.

If your parents were married for 17 years before your mother died, how old were you? How aware were you of what they had been like earlier? What had changed? In short, how good a position were you to judge?

I say this because I know for a fact that my 9 year old son's view of my marriage and my view of the same thing are virtually unrelated. He sees, but he cannot understand. Nor does he have any idea what changes came before he was 5.

Here is perspective. My aunt and uncle were married nearly 60 years. They had one of the best marriages that I am aware of. Most of their children were unable to recognize the constant work in the face of ongoing changes that caused that until after they were married adults themselves.

Do you really know your parents' marriage as well as you think?

I was eleven when she died. I'm 23 now, however, speaking to my father about their marriage essentially confirms my view.

They might be a counter-example to the many experiences that I am aware of. On the other hand, it could also be a case where he misremembers his own past to fit the story he wants to tell. (That is not an accusation, by the way, most of us do that to some degree or another. I certainly have.)

Without more information, it is impossible to tell.

However my opinion remains to trust the many experiences that I have had, and the experiences of people that I have known well. Your parents' story is not what most should expect to have happen.

A very good point.

My father always tells I will be able to understand my mom far better than he did. And my sister will be able to understand him far better than my mom did.

This happens for one simple reason. Kids think their parents marriage is perfect, because they are born into that assumption as that is all they see.

>>Kids think their parents marriage is perfect

Not everyone grew up in a Hallmark special. There are plenty of kids in this world with a more realistic outlook of the world than you're allowing them.

Maybe it's cynical to say that words are cheap, but do you contest it is not true?

I would take this guy's account with a great big huge grain of salt. The guy writes for a living. I have no reason to believe his words as written, especially when the facts don't seem to make much sense.

That said, you seem to think that people getting married are rational and completely committed to their marital agreements. Unfaithful spouse statistics and divorce statistics tell a much different story.

I think it can be easily argues that all marriages are made with imperfect information. Not only do people not know their spouse, but they also don't know themselves. Then consider how people change over their lifetime and I wonder how the divorce rate is so low.

When you get married, you aren't signing up to be a caretaker to a mentally unstable spouse. If your spouse is harming your children, it's your responsibility to get your children out of that situation however possible. There are thousands of legitimate situations that you'd agree are worthy of divorce.

There's a lot not said in this article. It's completely possible that he and his wife weren't well suited for each other to begin with. Roseanne was on the air for nine seasons. That's a lot of time to build resentment and hatred, if that's what was happening. Maybe the two years where he stayed at home let them figure out just how much they didn't care for each other. There are lots of legit possibilities.

It's not as simple as not living up to your commitment.

It's not as simple as not living up to your commitment.

Yeah, mostly it really is. I'd make an exception if there is abuse or cheating going on, but yes when you get married you are signing up to be a caretaker to a sick, unstable, dying, unemployed, depressed, failing, whatever spouse. That's the deal. If you aren't prepared for that, don't get married.

That's incredibly idealistic. As thasmin says, people don't know themselves when they're getting married. I think you read it as a justification (rather than an explanation - which I believe is what the thasmin meant) of why people leave.

If you aren't prepared for that, don't get married.

Have you been married to a mentally ill person? Probably not. Why so quick to judge? (And why the arbitrary exception for abuse or cheating?)

How many people think about the possibility that their partner may become physically or mentally ill when they get married? Most people assume their life will be great and don't really think about how they would handle really bad situations later on.

>>When you get married, you aren't signing up to be a caretaker to a mentally unstable spouse.

If not to help each other, what else is the purpose of a marriage?

If you are healthy, and have money these days you don't need anyone. You can buy anything you want, live the way you like, and find all the companionship you need in the world. Money solves nearly all problems in the world these days, the ones it doesn't are generally the ones that you can't solve without money either.

Its only during the times of crisis you need people to stand beside you.

We might as well completely do away with the whole concept of marriage.

> Money solves nearly all problems in the world these days

Looks like somebody's not rich.

Why do you need to be married to have people stand beside you in times of crisis? Such people should care about you unconditionally, not because they are contractually bound to you.

My experience of having gone through a relationship with an abusive cheater and subsequent two-years research on the topic reading confessions and engaging with fellow men indicates that these words are written from a contemporary female perspective.

Out of failed relationships, a typical westernised woman involved tends to take a marriage like something that can be ditched at any point if anything at all goes wrong; men, on the contrary, tend to stick by their wives. Statistics tell that the majority of divorces in westernised society nowadays are initiated by women. [1]

The legal landscape at least here, in UK, means that after a relationship fails and a divorce in practical terms its predominately men who are left with the financial burden of the split.

[1] http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/divorces-in-england-and-...

Such BS. How many men leave their wives for younger women? All the famous ones do. Sergey Brin, Rupert Murdoch, etc

You just attempted to refute data from the UK government including >100,000 samples per year showing women overwhelmingly petitioning for divorce more often than men by providing 2 anecdotes which are entirely consistent with that data. (Men do file for divorces. Women still file for divorces more often.)

Try again.

Half of all marriages in the USA end in divorce. It can cost a lot of money in legal fees when child custody and access are involved and there's any contentiousness (say $50k normally, upwards of $250,000 for a real fight).

So yes, if the relationship deteriorates sufficiently, it is "that easy". Vows don't mean much anymore. People marry with very limited information. If they truly had to vow, they'd wait a lot longer (many years!) before deciding.

It is amazing how two people that once vowed to live with each other can become mortal enemies filled with rage, but it's surprisingly common.

Nothing like this will ever be easy or decided in an instant. A close friend of mine once categorized these types of decisions as "choices no one should ever have to make."

Once you're faced with them, you learn something new about yourself and no one can prepare you for it. I find comfort more in the fact that a decision is made rather than dwelling on the consequences because life is just too precious to be spent on resentment and regret. Sometimes, just having a decision made can be the best possible outcome...

Reality doesn't work like that. The stress and depression from lack of income and the prospect of homelessness will rapidly destroy the "good feelings" that power love and a relationship as well as many women's attraction to their male partner.

If a woman can escape homelessness and poverty by re-marrying someone else, it seems to be a rational choice. Do you really think she would tough it out with him on the streets just for the sake of "love?" Why -- to avoid a latent feeling of guilt? We are all self-interested beings, even the love we offer others is in our own self-interest.

I would have got my spousal visa to Germany asap and headed there with the wife, personally.

Almost any partner who can't be with you during your struggles definitely doesn't deserve to be with you during your success.

Besides, what the purpose of a man's life anyway? To slog until death to provide milk and honey to the kids and wife. And then be perfectly OK to be dumped like a 'use and throw' napkin on the street when you can't provide further. While the wife goes to live with another man, and kids go their paths.

I wouldn't be surprised if marriage as an institution is completely destroyed in the far future. Because after some time men will make 'rational' choices too. Its far better to stay single make money for your later years. Than to have a family who is going to milk you until they can, and ultimately leave you anyway.

It SOUNDS like she went to Germany first so that their children had a safety net which seems totally prudent.

I don't think the other guy came into it until later. I would also be interested to know if they divorced before or after the move to Germany.

My grandmother used to say that there are 2 vacant thrones in heaven, waiting for the couple that never did regret to have gotten married.

I'm turning 40 next week and I haven't been in a situation like that, but I've been in many kinds of situations.

If you expect human beings to act rationally, to stay true to their vows no matter what, to actually know why they do things, to actually do the things they know are best for them, etc........ I can only say you're in for a hell of a ride.

Good luck.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm lucky for having been through hell on earth a few times in my short (23) life already. Some would say it's turned me into a cynic. On the contrary, I'm optimistic about peoples ability to adapt, and my own. I know that life is hard, and that helps me prepare rather well!

Have you met him? I haven't. I don't think we know enough about him, his situation, his wife, or his kids, to judge them for their actions.

I ordered the book on Amazon, and I'm sure it will be a good read from which I can learn a lot. At the end of it, I won't have to judge all the characters.

life is what happens while you make plans.

It's a question of available energy.

Raising children requires energy; I think raising eight children requires an enormous amount of energy (I have 3 and can barely manage).

Fighting poverty requires a lot of energy, esp. when there are 10 mouths to feed.

And a maintaining a relationship in the long term also requires energy -- much more than you think: staying married is a full-time job.

So I think that at the end of the day there probably wasn't enough energy left for the relationship, and so it broke. Nothing to do with vows or morals here; just a fuel problem.

I am 35 and I share this mindset about close relationships. Family is similar to a start-up in that founders should be prepared to carry each other through ups and downs pooling the risks and sharing not only profits but losses.

What I learned from failed relationships so far is that you have to be careful who you closely associate with for start-up and family purposes alike. The initial excitement and enthusiasm might be blinding, you owe it to yourself to vet candidates carefully.

Marriage vows are meaningless in a non-religious context. I'm not saying religious marriages are more successful (statistics show they're roughly as likely to fail), but I can't come up with a serious secular case for maintaining a wedding vow or any other kind of vow.

The "worse" part of the vow has an asterisk after it. Most spouses will have a maximum level of badness they will tolerate, then they will split.

I downvoted you for your bias about marriage vows being meaningless in a non-religous context.

It may be difficult for the religious to understand, but atheists and agnostics can certainly be as moral or more so as a religious person. Those of us that are not religious can derive our morality from valid sources other than religion, including real life. Humans do not require morality from a higher power, and to assert otherwise is to assert your own bigotry.

That's fair, but I just don't see why anyone would allow a "vow" to have any hold on them in extreme situations unless they felt some cosmic thing were being violated. There is certainly no legal or even significant social pressure to stay with a spouse at any cost, so what significance does breaking the "vow" hold? Not being true to oneself? Then you're sort of your own god, willing to punish yourself for something everyone else is readily willing to forgive you for.

I can't imagine someone making a personal vow to pay back their mortgage at any cost, when they're legally allowed to walk away. Even if it meant the total destruction of their future.

> Marriage vows are meaningless in a non-religious context.

Since marriage was a legal contract of the government before the Church got involved (originally, at something of arms length) in blessing marriages, and because it remained a legal contract enforceable through the civil courts even after the Church got deeply involved, I don't think that's even a little bit true.

It may be true that various modern concepts like no-fault divorce have made specific legal consequences of violating the express or implied promises in marriage less significant in the modern world, mutual promises have meaning even outside an enforcement regime, and the historical precedent of a non-religious enforcement regime demonstrates that the religious content is not essential to meaning even if you view meaning as requiring an external punishment structure.

Wow. He is about my age, and he lived in some of the same cities at the same time I was living in them. After reading this article, I immediately shared it on my Facebook wall before coming here to comment.

Some of the comments posted before this one express puzzlement about his "homelessness" when, after all, he had immediate relatives who still had a house to live in. Many cases of people living on the street are cases of people who have untreated behavior disorders that make them very hard to live with, even for their immediate relatives who have living space. The case of the author here is a case of a man who was brought up (as I am sure, having come from the same generation) to feel that it is his responsibility to provide for his children, and not their responsibility to provide for him. He used to live in Minnesota, where there is lethal cold outdoors during winter, but he was homeless in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where it can feel cold at night but where the weather is liveable outdoors year-round. The author thought it was more dignified and honorable to live in a car or something else like that than to crash in his children's housing.

On the whole, I'm very impressed by this man's maturity of outlook and gracious recognition of other people's point of view. He acknowledges, as several comments here have pointed out, that he made inexpedient career decisions. For a while, as he also acknowledges, he was "married to his job," and didn't give his wife enough encouragement and support as she brought up their children. He isn't passing blame around, but accepting responsibility. He may be a failure in economic terms in recent years, but his attitude now is admirable and shows a capacity to grow and keep on learning in middle age.

Do any of us know what industry and what form of employment will be a sure thing twenty or thirty years from now? No. But we can be sure that life is full of surprises, which sometimes include setbacks or even complete failures. Being ready to bounce back and try again is a good capacity to develop during youth. It's a crucial capacity to continue to develop into middle age. Now I'm curious about the book[1] from which this article was excerpted. This is the kind of thing I'd like to read for myself, as advice from one dad to another, and the kind of thing I'd like my children to read to prepare for their own independent adult lives.

[1] Tell Me Something, She Said by David Raether

http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-Something-She-Said/dp/14936318...

"For a while, as he also acknowledges, he was "married to his job," and didn't give his wife enough encouragement and support as she brought up their children."

Great comment but it's unclear to me how giving his wife encouragement and support as she brought up their children would have changed the outcome?

Are you saying they wouldn't have gotten divorced? And if they hadn't he would still have a place to live?

From my experience if you don't "bring home the bacon" spouses have little sympathy or care about little else. Money is a basic necessity.

The most important thing is earning a living. No spouse that I ever know of ever cared about how many ball games or how you helped around the kitchen or shared responsibilities if you don't bring home a paycheck.

I read it as younger, more foolish people believe if they're the best quisling they can be, if they can just throw away their life for the cause better than the next guy is throwing away his life, then the cause will obviously reciprocate and take care of him later, when he needs it. So throw away the kids sports games, work 80 hours, at least the company will take care of me later when I need help. The real world usually does not work like that, and the only really certain outcome of being the best slave you can be, is missing out on being a parent. And/or husband.

As a supposedly honors college grad and well read and all that he surely has heard of the greek concept of moderation in all things etc. May have not made it into the essay for whatever reason.

If he talked back to his boss and "cut back" to 70 hours, he probably would still be in the biz, or maybe he would have been downsized for not being a team player. Who knows. But one certain result would have been being a parent or husband for ten more hours/week.

A lot of modern high-paying jobs that require rare skills are all-or-nothing affairs: the choice between fewer hours & less pay and more hours & more money just isn't there.

Some teams have to be small and be able to react quickly to very tight deadlines meaning high work intensity and long hours to remain just on top of what's going on in the environment.

Not being around as your family grows up means that they have less emotional support when things go wrong. If he had worked less and earned less, then suddenly things fail, he may have had a better relationship with his partner to say hey, let's figure this out. At some point not having your partner around because they choose to work instead of being with you just gets hard and you start to lose faith in them as the person you want to be with the rest of your life. Not to say that under any circumstances things would have worked out but it's not fair to say the wife wanted money and otherwise get out.

I don't think that's really true. My dad was a househusband from about a year after I was born until his death. My mom grumbled about it once or twice, but she stuck with him until then, and I always got the feeling she didn't care all that much about the money.

What does seem to be non-negotiable is self-respect; I don't know anyone who can respect or care about someone who doesn't respect themselves. And as a man in contemporary American society, you get a lot of messages that you're worthless if you don't have a job. You don't have to buy into those messages, though.

I've also found that there's a high degree of selection bias in what spouses care about. If you always end up in relationships where people care about "bringing home the bacon", it's probably because you care about bringing home the bacon, and people tend to attract like-minded partners. There are many, many women who don't care about this.

My take was that he left the workforce to spend more time with his family, and that was the explanation for his two year resume gap that ultimately snowballed into homelessness. I don't know what the lesson is, but it is either:

1) Find work-life balance so you don't feel the need to take an extended sabbatical to spend time with your family.

2) Even if you really want to take time off to spend time with your family, being continuously earner is more important. Even $500k in savings disappears quickly if the job market turns.

I think you read the wrong message about why his marriage ended.

Rather than separating over the lack of paycheck, he and his ex-wife chose to forgo his paycheck initially because the demands of his high-stress job did not leave room for his role as a husband and father. He did not work for two years by choice in order to be with his family.

When he wasn't able to go back, they continued on together as a family through foreclosure, living in a two-bedroom apartment as a family with 8 children. He didn't earn a paycheck for six years before they separated. It sounds like they continued on together until they were simply unable to pay for housing.

She took the younger children to Germany, where as citizens they had a good education system and social safety net to rely on, and he stayed in the States and kept in contact with the teenage kids so they could remain in the same high school.

These decisions do not reflect a spouse that simply does not care how many ball games her husband attended. They describe a team who consistently prioritized their children's stability and education over a paycheck or even their marriage.

Except that she let him remain homeless and fell in love with another man.

Why is that not ok?

Seriously?

"I provided for you and our 8 kids for 15 years but it's pretty much OK if you just want to go to live in Germany to sleep with another dude and leave me here to die alone by hunger just because now I'm hitting rock bottom economically"

Is not about love, is about being a fucking decent human being.

She moved to Germany to provide housing, health care, and education for their younger children. Divorce came later.

Funny how 'love' can be spelled 'financial security'.

They separated two years after they lost the house. She went to Germany since she had German citizenship (he didn't). She was still taking care of several small children. How exactly do you propose she could have not "let" him remain homeless?

The falling in love with another man happened some years later still.

I find it apalling how ready people in this comment subtree are to villify a woman based on their ignorant misjudgement of the situation.

I find it appalling how quickly you turn to words like 'ignorant' and 'vilify' when all I've done is point out the obvious.

"She went to Germany since she had German citizenship (he didn't)."

They were married and had been for a long time (i.e. demonstrably not a "sham marriage"). The husband would have got a permanent residency and work visa in Germany.

>>because the demands of his high-stress job did not leave room for his role as a husband and father.

This guy was in a no win situation here. He was working 17 hours a day to provide for the family. And their expectation was that he could just provide, provide and provide. After they had enough of the money, they wanted his time. But after some time, they needed the money again. It more or less seems like this guy was treated like a money making machine who exists only to serve their purpose.

When he hit a bottom he was just abandoned. The wife went on some where and with someone who could provide further. The children felt its not their obligation to take of the father. While they expected it was father's obligation to care of them.

Ultimately this feels like classic 'Use and throw' attitude. He was used, and when he was no longer useful he was thrown. Frankly speaking if I were him, I would no longer want to keep any contact with that kind of people again.

Its likely if this guy gets rich again. His wife will suddenly discover love for him again. Children will suddenly find compassion for their father. Its just all about the money.

How about you try how much work taking care of EIGHT children is before you slader that woman, asshole?

Also, read the damn article, fully.

You can express your opinion without stooping to crude insults. In fact, people listen to you better when you do, in my experience.

This. He had likely abandoned his well-paying job because of burn-out caused by the long hours and lack of appreciation at home where he was treated as an ATM.

I am talking from personal experience and many stories of my peers. In the modern Western society many men are isolated and do not talk to each other about their family problems. If they did they'd found out how similar their stories are - overworked, unappreciated by their wives with their kids brought up to despise them, quietly carrying the entire financial burden of the family on their backs.

Whilst the author had to pick up the pieces of spending gone out of control his entire "family" moved on. As soon as he became a liability instead of an asset his wife discarded him.

>>overworked, unappreciated by their wives with their kids brought up to despise them, quietly carrying the entire financial burden of the family on their backs.

This is pretty much what men undergo around the world.

Or maybe he should not have had 8 kids without properly planning. No one forces you to get married or have a large family*

*Unless you are in India, where marriage is some super expectant type thing.

This is a story of a family's financial decisions and hardships- there isn't room in a few hundred words to also include all of the compassion and love that they hold for each other.

It wasn't foreseeable that demand for writers would be halved within the next two years and he would be completely unemployable. He left a strong job market with a very successful resume and returned to a to a job market with very little demand. Had he not left his job two years earlier, he may have ended up in this situation anyway.

His family didn't abandon him. They made by, looked for jobs, kept the house as long as they could. They moved into an apartment and continued doing what they could to keep going.

But once you can no longer pay for housing for your children nothing else matters. If you cannot solve that problem, the state will for you if you are lucky, or they will end up on the streets.

It would have been impossible for him and his wife to have lived together at this point. There is simply no family or friend who is able to take in 2 adults and 8 children at once. They had very few options at this point, and housing is a much easier problem to solve for smaller groups of people.

His wife didn't immediately abandon him for someone else. She stayed by his side for six years of no income, and then took responsibility for the younger children while he took responsibility for the older children. She moved around the world to provide for their younger children as best she could.

As far as his children are concerned, it simply isn't age-appropriate to expect high school students to financially provide for their parents. Even if they could have, it isn't what the author would have wanted. He made it very clear in the article that at this point in time, the goal was for his older children to graduate from the same high school with good grades and go to a good college. At best, his older children could have worked minimum wage jobs part time. This would not have fixed the father's long term unemployment, and would place a high risk on his children's grades (and future educational opportunities), along with a huge amount of financial stress and responsibility on his kids.

This article is a fairly accurate portrayal of how an upper-middle class family in the United States would handle poverty. The first priority is health (fortunately none of his children had major health issues), and after that maintaining education for the kids. Housing decisions are often made as a result of what is needed for education. The last thing you want is for the kids to drop out of school, leading them to work minimum wage jobs into adulthood. At that point short-term poverty can become generational.

The fact that he and his wife provided good education paths for all 8 of their children throughout this story is an incredible accomplishment for him and his wife. While their marriage may not have ended in death, I would not consider it a failure.

My husband was laid off two years ago. Since then, I "bring home the bacon." He cooks, does the dishes, does the laundry, cleans the house, does all of the shopping, works on the house, walks the dog, does my errands, and just about everything else. When we have a baby, he will be the primary caretaker of our child. It is not the usual path, but it is working out well for us so far. The hardest part for me was getting over the notion that I was being taken advantage of. Money was not the issue, fairness was. However, we are in the admittedly privileged position of being able to live well off of one income. If we were struggling financially, I suppose that I would be telling a different story.

Thanks for sharing this! I'm curious to hear more. Could you share how (or to what extent) you got over your feeling of being taken advantage of?

In the late 1980s, I was a househusband at home with our daughter while my wife worked. In the early 1990s, we traded places and she stayed home with our son while I worked. About 4 years each time. We were fortunate in being able, as you said, to live well off of one income.

But it puts a dent in one's career path. I was a software engineer, but found it difficult afterwards to get back into development. So I did testing, systems admin, database maintenance, even teaching.

I hope your family can make your situation work out in ways that are good for all of you.

Find different spouses. Not everybody has money as their first priority.

Yes, you're a team and split work, and both parties contribute - but that split can look different for different people. If you can afford it, why not take some time out to spend it with your children?

I just want to say I really appreciate hearing your perspective on things, tokenadult. Everytime I see one of your comments I make sure to read it because I know how thoughtful they tend to be.

You nailed it. I lived in a Honda Civic this summer as I was getting a startup off the ground (http://www.austenallred.com/founders-never-say-die/), and I had a half dozen people offer to let me stay at their place or crash on their couch rent-free.

I was certainly grateful for their hospitality, however self-sufficiency, even if it comes to the extent of living in a car and scalping soccer tickets for a living, feels completely different than being a welfare case. As a result, I wasn't living in a car for lack of other options, but rather out of belief that I could create something by sheer will-power, and that I was going to do that come hell or high water. My homelessness was a matter of seeking something greater than myself, not being lost to poverty.

Sure, it wasn't convenient to live in a car, and it made some parts of life a little more complex. But you can read some Thoreau, realize how free you really are, and work on what you love and believe in every minute of every day. That's powerful, whether it's a startup or getting back on your feet.

Damn this makes me feel way better about not listening to all my friends that told me to sign up for food stamps while started my company. Too me I wasn't unemployed

On the other hand, you should never feel shame about applying for food stamps. Those programs exist for good reason, and if you were employed before you've probably paid your fair share into the social safety nets (in some states they break it down so you can see exactly how much you paid)

I would prefer government to spend money on feeding people, rather than killing them. For that reason, I don't think people should be ashamed of taking food stamps, they may be indirectly saving others by doing so, since money spent feeding them is money not spent on military.

The money comes from separate budget and you can bet that if they need to cut costs they'll cut social benefits before military spending (not that I opposed people using welfare, that's what it's for).

I respectfully disagree, but hear me out first. A man's boat capsizes in the middle of the ocean and he prays to God for help. A man in a canoe comes by and ask's him to jump on and he declines, saying that the lord God will save me, a man in a speedboat comes by and he declines again, saying that the lord God will save me, a cruise liner comes by and he declines again and straight after he drowns. When he gets to heaven he says, "what the hell God, i put my faith in you and prayed to you for help and you let me die." God says to him "I sent you help three times and you refused it."

Mitt Romney's father was on foodstamps, but used that help to catipult him. This is real life, you look for edges not to abuse them but to help them elevate you. You take financial aid to get a degree to elevate you. If you took fin aide just to game the system with no intention of actually studying and not paying off your loan, that is a different story. Do not confuse seeking out and taking advantage of help to progress with abusing help. People certainly do that but if you came from a disadvantaged background take any edge you get and use it to get you up that mountain.

This is a little different.

Self-confidence is important when you are trying to accomplish something big, and feeling like someone else is bailing you out undermines that.

Everybody is different, but some people need to know they can bounce back from the hardest circumstances and the only way to do that is to face them head on as they come.

Its good if you have that safety net of friends and family to help out. Not everybody has that, and there is never a guarantee that you always will. This is where one would find comfort in knowing that even then, they can survive.

If you can survive the worst, your personal definition of impossible is redefined.

I'll ask him what he thinks of this tomorrow night.

My buddy and I are interviewing him for our podcast, The Crazy Ones. So far in talking to him he sounds like a really nice, genuine guy.

Can you link to your podcast? I'd like to listen to it but googling the podcast name is not producing any good results.

From this language, it might not be released yet:

https://twitter.com/TrevMcKendrick/status/400348753670197248

This is the first I'm hearing about it, and I'm looking forward to it too. Trevor's blog is great.

you can read some Thoreau, realize how free you really are

For me it's the opposite. Any time I'm set adrift, I feel trapped. Counter-intuitive, perhaps, but to me I feel like Jack of the Lantern, trapped in purgatory.

> Some of the comments posted before this one express puzzlement about his "homelessness" when, after all, he had immediate relatives who still had a house to live in. Many cases of people living on the street are cases of people who have untreated behavior disorders that make them very hard to live with, even for their immediate relatives who have living space. The case of the author here is a case of a man who was brought up (as I am sure, having come from the same generation) to feel that it is his responsibility to provide for his children, and not their responsibility to provide for him.

Sorry, but that's stupid. You have to be able to lose (http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=56 - chapter 19).

I suspect that this comment was downvoted for a DH2 reason (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html).

1) I think it's ok to say that someone did something stupid.

2) I think the error he made (not being able to lose) is an important error to be avoided. That's why I posted the comment.

If you want to call something stupid, it's likely to go over better if you can provide a coherent justification for saying so, instead of linking to a gigantic page of Harry Potter fanfiction and expecting everyone else to reconstruct the argument you had in mind.

Also, "wrong" is not necessarily the same as "stupid", and "disagrees with Eliezer Yudkowsky" is not the same as "wrong".

I thought I linked to the chapter. It's chapter 19 if you're interested.

I agree that wrong isn't the same as stupid, but in this case I meant to say stupid.

I thought it would be apparent that it was a stupid decision but maybe I should have justified it.

One way to look at it is that rules (like "parents don't depend on their children") are just guidelines used to achieve desirable outcomes. In choosing how you act, you should aim to achieve the outcome, not to follow the rule. It seems that in his "not depending on his children", he acted to follow the rule, instead of to achieve the outcome.

It might have been more helpful if you had linked to a text version:

http://hpmor.com/chapter/19

edit: It might also have gone over better if you had said "irrational" rather than "stupid", or perhaps "foolish". You were (if I understand right) saying that if he was unwilling to call on family for help, he was unwilling to lose face, unwilling to lose.

I believe differently. I'm sure part of it was hubris, and the shame of being homeless must sting, but I saw it more as trying to save face for his children. THEY knew he was homeless, but whenever he visited them near school of friends, he dressed in business dress so as to disguise his situation from THEIR friends. That sounded more like someone that was trying to ensure his kids have a smooth trajectory despite his own mistakes.

That said, you may still be right: it's possible that he never _asked_ for the favor of staying with a child's friend's family. (His kids were in school, I gathered, rather than adults -- did I miss that?) Had he done so, finding a job might have been easier ... though I am pessimistic enough to wonder how much, given the trouble he had once people saw the "gap" in his employment.

That's a good point about him potentially wanting to save face for his kids. However, I don't want to speculate on what his thinking was. I don't know what his thinking was, and don't have enough information to infer what it was.

My point is only that IF he was doing it to save face for himself, that it's a stupid decision. His pride is less important than his well being (in terms of his happiness, his chances of bouncing back, his family and friends' happiness etc.).

Regarding my use of the word "stupid", I stand by it. I don't mean to be contentious at all. And I don't mean that he is a stupid person. I just mean that that decision is a stupid one (IF he in fact made it).

As far as stupid vs. foolish vs. irrational goes, I don't understand the meanings and connotations of these words well enough to really say, but I get the sense that 'stupid' does a better job of "calling someone out" and emphasizing the fact that a bad decision was made. I think these tasks needed to be accomplished, and so I think 'stupid' was the right word.

WOW!! This is what you call succeeding in life at all costs, grabbing it by the balls and saying you are not going to defeat me. This was inspiring and a guy like this earns my respect any day. He has 8 kids, held them on his shoulders till his last, how many fathers, pro athletes, rich people(even steve jobs for a while) abandon their kids to make their life easier. This is about being a man, tackling life Up, Close and Personal. This book will be on my bookshelf. I honestly believe that this story is not for the 20somethings..... but the 30somethings and up.

I feel like there must be more to this story. At one point he says he was making $300K from his main job + $650K from a side job in a year. Even assuming that his average year was only half this money, we're talking $475K. If he did this for 10 years, he'd have brought in almost $5M, or about $6.5M in 2012 dollars. If he invested and got a 5% return on his money (easy back in those days), he's over $7.5M in 2012 dollars. Sure, taxes, but even if a third of his money were gone for that, he's still left with $5M in 2012 dollars.

I understand living is not free, nor is raising kids. But, even if he spent $10,000/month on mortgage payments (which should be building him equity) and $120K on raising each child (prorated over this 10 year period), we're looking at $1.7M in expenses.

He states that he saved well and lived below his means, but yet states that his savings when he quit was $500K. Something doesn't add up.

The author's story is a great one for a variety of reasons, but the disconnect between his comments ("I had carefully saved and we had lived well below our means", "I had prudently saved and invested during my years in television") and the reality (his $500,000 "nest egg" and ultimate financial collapse) do seem at odds with each other.

I don't, however, think that there's more to the story. A lot of people, perhaps the majority, pay more attention to what they earn than what they keep. They mistakenly believe that their savings rate must be higher than it actually is, and they make questionable assumptions about future earnings.

Ironically, I think this is often easier to do the more you gross. When you don't have to worry about paying the bills, have enough left over to live comfortably and feel that your position in the economy is secure, it's easy to ignore the fact that you're not taking full advantage of your opportunity to save. I guarantee you there are a lot of folks riding today's tech boom who are making the same fundamental financial mistakes as the author, and most of them aren't grossing anywhere near what he was at his peak.

Indeed, my parents saved over twice that amount, paid off a mortgage, and put two kids through university, and made maybe $70,000 combined in their best years.

His nest egg may not have included his retirement accounts.

You don't have any equity when your house is repossessed, never mind if you have remortgaged it umpteen times.

Based on the article, it looks like he made good money 1997-2002 or so, then took a couple of years off, tried to go back in 2004, and spent out his $500k by 2008 while trying and failing to find work.

1. Bay Area is ex$$pensive.

2. 8 kids. Eight.

3. Taxes - his take home salary was probably not 975,000 or even 475,000.

4. Living within means and saving well meant something different back then. Even if he had the foresight to realize the bubble would burst, which most educated people did, no one realized how bad it would get.

He lived in Los Angeles, not the San Francisco "bay area".

Unless I am mistaken and there's a "bay area" in Los Angeles.

Fair point. Is Los Angeles cheap? I know it's cheaper than SF, but is it considered cheap in general? I don't think it is, but I'm not sure.

Los Angeles is a big place, but I don't think San Marino was ever cheap:

"In 2010, Forbes Magazine ranked the city as the 63rd most expensive area to live in the United States, with the median list price of a single family home at US$1,987,500."

He lived in San Marino which seems at least as expensive as the bay area. http://www.zillow.com/san-marino-ca/

He lost the house; meaning a lot of money went to the trashcan because he couldn't afford keeping a house for 10 people (the common ones with 4 rooms are already very expensive)

Assume an average of 500K, assume total taxes are 50%, assume living expenses grow with income (i.e. once you've "made it", you live a little bit more in the now, rather than for a tomorrow that never comes); having a nest egg of 500K isn't too bad.

(I'd love to only pay 33% in taxes.)

> My agent told me that I faced a common problem for writers my age: Producers could hire a team of first-time writers for less than the fee they would pay me for my services. But they won’t know what they’re doing, I countered. They don’t care, he responded.

Hmm. That sounds awfully familiar.

I understand this conundrum - I experienced homelessness myself. I had a top notch education, attended a top program in mathematics for graduate school as a PhD student, ABD (All But Dissertation)...and ended up homeless after leaving graduate school. I did not prepare for the real world at all - I naively expected the real world to recognize a talent like mine and seize it. I quickly learned that was not the case.

I joined the military out of desperation over that reality. It was a hard way to live, but it had its rewards. It wasn't the life I wanted to live though, and so, after completing initial active duty training, I was out on the job search again.

I applied to just about any white collar job I could, touting my education, excellent intelligence, and ability to learn quickly. Still no luck. I got fed up and started to teach myself coding. I started to enjoy it greatly. A little more than a year after leaving active orders, I found an entry level job at a non-profit - a dream position for me at the time, minus the pay, but it was pay that I couldn't even touch in salary before.

My pay made me more hungry to succeed, so I spent many offhours & downtime during work to learn as much as I could about web development. I switched jobs only 10 months into that first career job in web development and became a senior frontend developer.

It has been not even a year since I started my career & I'm on track to be a successful professional. From 3 1/2 years ago to 1 year ago, I was essentially homeless. I used whatever means possible to survive, and kept as sane as I could throughout all that time.

Homelessness was a humbling experience. It was painful, but it was illuminating. I made bad decisions, as well as my parents, but the situation got me to reflect and put myself back on the right path, with some help from friends. I am still the same person as I ever was, but my compassion for others with legitimate troubles has grown. I still help anyone I can & who is willing to set their lives on the right path, as others helped me beforehand.

What technologies and projects did you have when you got the initial position at the non-profit?

I've spent about a year doing the same, but I still feel unprepared with only some small, unfinished projects in my repository. There always seems to be some additional technology I need to learn before being job ready.

Thanks for the read.

I built webpages and figured out CSS well enough where I understood how to use it to do most standard things. I learned how to use jQuery to do custom behavior such as setting width on certain elements depending on the browser window size (which I now know I should have been doing via CSS), animating, etc. I figured out how to use LESS functionally, if not structure my HTML & CSS well enough to take huge advantage of it.

I built a basic homepage in Ruby on Rails using Twitter Bootstrap with SASS, without really understanding SASS that well except that it looked similar to LESS.

I knew nothing about best practices - nobody taught me anything like that before getting that first position. I hackishly created stuff, including a WordPress plugin that pulls Twitter JSON tweet data for a particular user & displayed it at the end of each post (without knowing about PHP's JSON decoding helper method) - this was for an interview that I did in about 1 day (but I did not get called back, probably because I did such horrible things such as manually parse the JSON into the strings I wanted).

For me, I happened into a good match since the non-profit needed someone to do frontend and learn some stuff like a client-side MVC framework & Node.js. I was desperate for any career-track job & zoomed in on web development, and the non-profit needed someone they could get as cheaply as possible, yet allow the person to grow while in the job. I think they got a lot more than they expected in me - I have far exceeded expectations at both of my jobs so far.

Hey, you have an interesting story. I was wondering if we could chat in private?

ta011011100@gmail

The main reason he failed is because the industries he picked - first publishing and second sitcoms - were declining industries. And no matter how smart or hardworking you are - and this dude was smart and prudent and hardworking - you can't fight against larger macroeconomic forces.

Sorry for the nitpicking, but you meant "macroeconomic". I agree with your point though.

Yep typo. It was 'macro' in my head.

Publishing I can understand, but a seasoned sitcom writer -- especially a Roseanne alum -- should have been able to pick up more writing work. I'm not saying he's lazy or entitled or anything like that, just that the world can sometimes be a scary place where you end up in a bad situation just by luck of the draw.

The article makes the point that sitcoms declined as reality TV was on the ascent. Fewer jobs available writing for sitcoms, and there were other great writers with current experience competing against him.

he only briefly mentions this, but he took 2 years off to spend more time with is family at exactly the wrong time, when the jobs started disappearing.

quite honestly anyone who takes two years off when their career is at peak potential shouldn't be surprised at anything career-wise that happens from that point forward. all bets are off when you just check the f out for 2 years.

how many successful people could take 2 years off from their work and expect things to be fine when they come back? this line of (non-) reasoning is sheer lunacy.

Regarding your last question - I'd say it's pretty much the norm in our field.

you should try it and see what happens.

go ahead, give yourself a 2 year break.

I did that. After the break, I found a contract that paid more than a double than the previous one. Then another break (this time a little less than a year), and another bump in pay. If you can show you're valuable, the gaps don't matter (at least, that is my experience).

You must be kidding.

Let alone taking a 2 year break. If you are not having side projects which you work after office hours, late night and weekends.

If you are not learning quickly, adapting or improving your skills fast enough. You are setting yourself up for disaster.

"And no matter how smart or hardworking you are "

We aren't talking about buggy whips here. There are jobs in that industry. Who do you think are getting those jobs? People who are stupid and lazy?

Of course a rising tide floats all boats. And of course it would have been better if he was an in demand programmer in SF. But most people aren't. And this is something they do need to deal with.

"Who do you think are getting those jobs? People who are stupid and lazy?"

People who are young and cheap. It says so right in the article.

I think it comes back to something we talk about quite a bit here: the advantage of the youthful entrepreneur. It's not that inexperienced 20-somethings and college dropouts are in any way superior to their older, credentialed, experienced peers.

It's just that, when you're taking moonshots, you should expect to miss most of the time. When you're tired of failing, you can go back to school, or start in a new career field. The gaps in your resume are there, but they're forgivable. You were hungry and foolish then, but you're ready to eat and learn now.

As others have noted, those gaps hurt a lot more when they appear later on. It's not fair, but it's just the way it is, unfortunately. Even if you were on your way to 20 years of employment at your stable dream job, layoffs can happen. Shit can happen. Count on it.

So are you claiming that there are no older people in those comedy writing jobs? At all. All are gone? Somehow I don't think that is the case.

(Did you read the whole article? He directly addresses this.)

I'm not claiming anything. That's what the article claims.

You are reasoning that smart and hard working people get these jobs, all smart and hard working people who apply will get a job, therefore anyone who doesn't is either stupid or lazy?

You need to be careful with that line of reasoning. Things change, it wasn't clear necessarily when Rosanne was on that Sitcoms were dying. Nor that the replacement wouldn't need jokes. The take away is things change and if multiple things change at the same time in a negative way it hurts.

What struck me was sitting in a library surfing the web. I'd much rather sit in the library and read books. If his description of the days being so long an boring and lonely for the homeless, does it make sense to start a program to read to them for a couple of hours a day. It won't be boring and it could be educational.

Plus you can check books out of the library, to read when the library is closed.

Can you do that if you're homeless? (I don't know for sure - my local library doesn't say either way except for the statement "living in or owning property in [my area]").

It must depend on a lot on the library, which must depend a lot on the city. I have read of cities in New Jersey winding up in litigation over trying to push out the homeless essentially camping there. I believe that a co-worker used to complain of the homeless crowding the main DC library.

Depends on the library, and perhaps on when you ask. The Cambridge Public Library web site now says they require a "current local address", so the homeless may be out of luck. But they used to require only that you be able to sign your name. (This was advertised with posters featuring a very dejected looking cat.)

And it was particularly hard to foresee that the replacement wouldn't need writers, which had been a basic requirement of broadcast serial entertainment since before television.

>>I'd much rather sit in the library and read books.

Unlikely.

Have you ever been seriously ill, and nothing that doctors seem to do is working? Have you been in a super shitty situation with massive amounts on uncertainty surrounding it?

The problem is people are so eager, and their energies are so much more spent in worry and anxiousness that stuff like 'book reading project' will be least of their priorities. All the time its like- Will this cure help? Can I get a job here? Can I move to somewhere cheaper?

From his perspective the priorities would have been, finding information or some lead or a job posting that can get him his next meal, a place to live, a long term solution to his problems.

A book reading project? People can't focus on reading a news paper correctly when are tensed and anxious. Such things are for the time of peace.

I have been, and for me, reading books was the single best form of escapism that took my mind entirely of the horrid pain I had to endure.

But I love reading, so there's that :)

I saw Bill Gates speak at Berkeley in 2001. He was urging, practically begging, the students to major in computer science.

Because you see in 2001 software and the internet looked like a "declining industry" as you put it. The dot-com bust made the idea that software would revolutionize the world look like so much idiocy.

Anyone who took Gates' advice is doing VERY well right now. But there was loads of skepticism in that audience, and lots of questions about offshoring.

My point is, it is incredibly hard to tell what will be a "declining industry" even five years forward. There's no way this guy would have known that television writing would get nuked by reality television.

Also, I hope people who read your comment don't make the mistake of thinking they can necessarily avoid this sort of misfortune simply by being smart enough.

Even as a teenager I reasoned that the job market and economy in general was like a rollercoaster and that the best time to study a subject was during a depression when nobody was hiring it.

So many students reasoned the exact opposite, though, and avoided CS because of the recent bubble.

I'd have pursued CS whatever the economy, though. I'm just lucky my take was right and my timing was lucky.

Yes. Taking 2 years off didn't help either. This sounds like the plight of people who take extended maternity or paternity leaves, only to find themselves unwanted in the workforce. Age discrimination is tough!

Which makes the idea that people who fall on hard times have no one to blame but themselves quite silly - people shouldn't be punished for failing to accurately predict the future of an industry.

In other words, the fact that these once huge industries were rapidly declining is a great argument for an increased social safety net.

No, the main reason he failed is because he had 9 dependent humans.

And some sort of obsession with excellence. Wikipedia relates that the median price of a home there is $1.98 million. I'm sure there is somewhere cheaper in L.A. that still has a very reasonable public school system.

Stories like this are why I work 40 hours per week at my full time job at an investment bank and then work 20 hours per week doing side consulting. Right or wrong, I believe that "There but for the grace of God go I".

As he says in the article:

I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation

This type of thing keeps me up at night. Should I take the night off watching a TV show or get more work done? Should I go to every single one of my kids' activities or should I spend some of them at home working? Having grown up relatively poor, I don't want to return to that and stories like this are scary.

I think you should learn from his later conclusion: He realized that people matter much more than money. Don't miss your children's childhoods for a few extra bucks, it's not worth it.

Save/invest a large percentage of your income, 50+ ideally. If you're making > 650k in a year, 500k in savings doesn't actually sound all that prudent.

That's really secondary though, step one is to not have 8 kids.

"step one is to not have 8 kids"

Really shows how intelligence and common sense are two different things.

Or making decisions based on emotionality and what you want.

Just because you want 8 kids (or 5 or whatever) doesn't mean it's a good idea to have that many kids.

And just because you think your passion is being a comedy writer doesn't mean it's a good idea to take that career path or take that gamble.

I mean I would imagine it would have been possible when he was offered the dream job by Tom Arnold to look at it rationality (hard but possible) and know enough about the business to realize the gamble he was taking.

As opposed to the gamble that a person fresh out of college w/o kids or a family in the same "go for the brass ring" situation.

The alternative to taking that job was staying in magazine publishing. Magazine publishing has probably done even worse than comedy writing over that time period.

>step one is to not have 8 kids

Having 8 kids does not have to be as expensive as you think. You can get clothes for next to nothing (or free if you are really poor), rooms can be shared, hand-me-down toys and clothes.

Food is really the only expense that multiplies. But if you are making big batches of food and using raw materials (large bags of rice, pasta or beans from Costco come to mind) it really does not have to be that expensive.

The author states how important it was to them to keep the kids in the best schools. This suggests that hey had fallen into a trap that many have. They believe that their kids will be better off if they have the best of everything (clothes, schooling, food, housing). This simply is not true. Look at what happened. The family was completely split into pieces. Some of the kids became almost foster kids. The mother abandoned some of the younger ones. Is this really better than a middle class family that stays together and has a lower standard of living?

The other part of this is, parents are fooled into thinking that they should work 60hrs a week so their kids will be better off. Their kids meanwhile are being raised by some strangers most of the time (day-care, after school care). The kids would rather just have the parent around than a bunch of extra toys, clothes and video games. The worst part is, the parent is not there teaching them haw to be upstanding and respectable men and women. Teaching them work ethic, discipline, values, morality, ETC.

How foolish this man was. He deserves the life he has been relegated to. His kids don't though - and I do feel sorry for them.

Disagree with me? This man made over 10 million dollars during his life and he is only in his early fifties.

Well how much "suffering" is it for you to work the way you do?

I mean no pain no gain. If you want to win a race you have to train, right? In this case the race is making sure you have enough socked away so you can be financially secure if you ever lose your ib bank job. Or just making enough to live a nice life. Not having to worry about money is also a stress reliever and gives you one less thing to lose sleep over. Nobody ever lost sleep over working hard, right?

"Should I go to every single one of my kids' activities or should I spend some of them at home working?"

Well, when your kids get old-er they will care more about what you can do for them that requires money. Not whether you missed a game or not. I've had girlfriends in the past with parents that have been the parent at everything they do. And once the child reaches late high school or college age they care more that their friend has a vacation home and that their dad can't pay for college or buy them things. So I'm firmly in the camp of "miss the events and make money". Other will tell you differently. Not that kids whose parents aren't around don't whine or you won't find a kid who has a "rich" parent who says they would have rather spent more time with them. That's what they say. But the truth is that's short sighted.

So I'm firmly in the camp of "miss the events and make money". Other will tell you differently. Not that kids whose parents aren't around don't whine or you won't find a kid who has a "rich" parent who says they would have rather spent more time with them. That's what they say. But the truth is that's short sighted.

Right on! When my father's job hook up in Dubai fell apart, he called my mom informing her that he can either return home to India to continue his struggling career or he can come to the US on a visit visa. My mom told him to take his chances and then spent hours tearing up, unclear how she was going to take care of four little kids.

It would take another seven years before my dad could get the rest of his family here. For all of that time, I barely knew my dad(there was no VoIP:). But the end result--or even the goal--made it all worth it.

You know what? There are americans that feel the way you do (and that I do) and they were raised in immigrant families more than likely. (As I was.) So it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that your father did what he did and now you see how glad you are that he made those choices which you benefited from. Not to mention what you mother went through.

Hey OT: I see that you have experience acquiring domains. I had a question related to it but couldn't find your contact info. Any way to reach you? You can drop me a line at zaidREMOVETHISPART@crystalmd.com, as well.

How will those kids feel once they are older, though? The things I miss from living with my dad were the little things, like helping him with tech support, or eating steaks while talking about $whatever, or seeing a movie on Sunday afternoons with him.

Maybe it's that I have never had a rich parent to shower me with luxury, so it never seemed a reasonable thing to expect.

I felt this way back during the dot-com bust. I was worried that a single bad choice on my end would lead to my entire bloodline failing, and I eventually had panic attacks, health problems, etc.

My advice to you is, give yourself some slack. Even if you make a few mistakes, it won't lead to catastrophic failure. Don't worry about work. Save your money dutifully, and go to your kids activities. You'll realize that there will always be opportunity as long as you're making good solid decisions. But you don't need to be working 24x7.

@300bps: What job is that? 40 hours per week at an investment bank?

On the flip side, plenty of people suffer heart attacks, alcoholism, cancer, etc. due to overworking and poor work/life balance. The safe bet is always moderation. Work hard, not too much, live comfortably but below your means.

He seems like a nice guy but comes across like he didn't really think through the implications of his life choices, and when they piled on top of each other, it put him in a bad place. (I'm almost his age & have faced many of the same issues but made different decisions.)

My take-aways:

- being a single-source-of-income family is risky

- the above is esp true if you have high cash outflow (big family & big mortgage in expensive part of the country)

- if you've saved less than 2x your current annual income, don't make the mistake of thinking that's a lot

- taking years out of the workforce, esp in the 2nd half of your career, can hurt your changes of getting back into a decent job

- industries can change really quickly, so don't get too comfortable just because your skill set is hot stuff at a given moment in time

- always have a plan to build up a secondary skill set or source of income (for example, imagine if he'd bought a small rental property back when he was flush...)

- think through the lifestyle implications of jobs/careers: for example a job that requires a lot of travel or long hours or relocation will have impacts on your family/ non-job life

- think through the implications of having a kid (much less eight) in terms of the stress on family finances, your time, your marriage

- there's resources online that can help with almost any problem you encounter in life, you just have to find and use them

> being a single-source-of-income family is risky

Meh. If you're the type that isn't going to save, you're not going to save whether you have 1 income or two.

All of this sounds like great advice. Heck, it's even perfect advice.

And, therein lies the problem. Life doesn't always (i.e. almost never does) present you with a perfect set of circumstances that allows you to respond by making the perfect set of choices.

For instance, you point out the need to consider that a job can have negative impact on family life. That's true. OTOH, perhaps that was his means of maximizing economic opportunity. It's a tough choice, and many make the same one he did every day (for better or worse).

Another: "being a single-source-of-income family is risky". Sure it is, but this must be weighed against the benefit of having one parent focused solely on raising the children (especially with a large family). Also, the costs of day-care in the case of multiple younger children vs. the earning potential of the at-home parent must be considered.

That's not to say the author didn't make poor decisions (as he's acknowledged). It's just to say that life presents a lot of really difficult decisions that frequently require making tradeoffs. Nailing them just right can be very, very difficult. Further, many times the quality of our decisions (or lack thereof) are borne out by circumstances that are beyond our control and not always by our prescient and masterful decision-making.

I feel for the guy, but it sounds like he was spending beyond his means from the start, and then quit his job on top of that. According to cnn the average cost of raising a child is 240K, not including college. Multiply that by 8 and spread it over 18 years, and that is 107K per year, for 18 years. And that is just for the kids.

It was a different time and all, but quitting your job completely when you have a large mortgage and 8 kids seems irresponsible. His eventual recovery is inspiring, but what would have happened to those 8 kids if his wife couldn't fall back on the German citizenship and its social safety net? This could have easily ended much worse for them.

He says he had $500K in savings at age 48. That seems a bit low considering his earnings and all the kids. Why he would think he was flush enough to risk two years off at that age I don't know.

He has 8 kids. 6 grown and moved on. Not one of them refused to let him be homeless? Had a couch for him to sleep on? A computer to search for jobs on?

He explains this in the article. Two children are in Germany with their mother, and the other children are still in high school or college. He hid his homelessness from all of them.

Exactly. So it's a macho thing (if that is the case).Well when push comes to shove you have to throw all of that out the window. Also, no friends or contacts that would even lend you money? I advanced a contractor $5000 once who had lost his job for work to be done over the next year. And I had never even met him in person (although he did work for perhaps several years..)

I don't think it's so much a macho thing. It's one thing to ask for help when you need it--but quite another to ask for help in the form of room and board, the implication (and correctly so, here) being that for whatever reason you are unable to support yourself.

As a father, to be unable to support yourself, let alone your kids, can be a destructive blow not only to your self-respect, but to your children's respect for you. I suspect that that's what he was trying to avoid, and I find it wholly reasonable. His children's respect might never return, and it's clear from the article that his relationship with his children is part of what he valued most.

I agree, and frankly I think it's a bit disgusting for people here to monday-morning-quarterback this man and his motives and decisions.

If it was easy to avoid the situation, he would have.

If this is the case, it's very sad that the relationships he values the most come with the caveat that he can't be vulnerable around those people. He's not allowed to fail before them. Not able to ask them for help when in need - or they lose all respect for him.

He didn't hide his homelessness, they knew that's why the mom and two kids moved to Germany (for the better social services). It doesn't say why he didn't live with his children, but it does say the mom and two youngest lived with two older kids for awhile and the high school aged kids bounced around with his friends so they could continue to attend their high school.

Sometimes it is a question of self respect. It's perhaps the last thing people cling to, to keep their sense of self alive. It is what probably keeps him going now.

My father refused to take any real help, till his final days.

In his own words, he wanted to "free" his children from the burden he had turned into - he wanted us to go out and succeed & never blame him for holding us back.

All I could do was get him his pills and sit by his bed & promise him that it wasn't a sacrifice (and that I would live my life, soon).

Not that it did any good to his self-worth, but it helps me sleep well at night, at least.

But in this article, he makes it seem as tho his failures were due to career choice, bad mortgages, age, etc. When in reality, it could simply have been self-respect, maybe stubbornness or pride. I just think this article may have been unfairly billed and titled because there is a HUGE piece missing - that of his own pride.

his failures were due to career choice, bad mortgages

He didn't blame anyone did he? He basically said he made all of the decisions, one by one. The source of those decisions may or may not have been what you propose as the explanation. But I think the characterization 'this article may have been unfairly billed and titled' seems...off, regardless. But maybe I'm missing something.

Finding friends for kids to stay with even short term is doable because grown ups take pity. Finding friends that'll let you stay - the threat being for extended periods - is a damn sight harder?

Why do you think his pride stopped him accepting help? Would you put up someone down on their luck?

Would I put up someone down on their luck? Yes. In an instant. No questions asked. Whether they were a friend or just an acquaintance.

Then find a local shelter and befriend someone. Do your bit!

This was a great read. Reminds me of a modern day version of George Orwell's classic, Down and Out in Paris and London

Bread, margerine and weak tea...

I'm actually on the other end of a very similar story with my mom.

My mom will turn 50 in just a few months and she is now homeless (lives with family for the movement), has no job, can not land another job, and has absolutely no money or savings.

She was a nurse and my step-dad was a software developer who made very good money, especially for the area. Both of them combined made over 200k a year. They were terrible with money and very rarely saved.

It started when my mom lost her nursing license and could no long hold her career, at all, anywhere. Not a big deal, step-dad made a lot of money. Then my step-dad decided to leave my mom. He was still going to help her until she bounced back, so not that huge of a problem. Until he got laid off... After months, he finally landed a new job at a startup, and it will be a while until he bounces back.

Now my mom is completely on her own. She has no money whatsoever. She has no home, and is living with one of her brothers. She took a year+ off work, and doesn't have a medical license to get a high paying nursing job.

Who wants to hire a 50 year old who hasn't worked in almost 2 years, and mysteriously isn't a nurse anymore? I feel for her, but a lot of bad financial, and personal decisions lead her to where she is now.

People who make great choices, can end up in bad situations and vice versa. I think people should stop trying rationalise bad circumstances.

May I ask, what prevents you from helping?

how did she lose her nursing license? is that a common occurrence?

Drug abuse about 10 years ago. Then missing mandatory testing, by being out of town or something. Not sure all the details.

Its fun to search for the word college

"Yes, I, David Raether, the smart and funny guy who graduated with honors from college"

"I ... helped high school seniors write college essays"

"The other children have finished college or are nearing completion."

And his story about his college buddy who couldn't write a magazine.

Yup kids graduating with honors made me what I am today, a dude living in a '97 minivan... while the dropouts are startup billionaires and bartenders for famous people make $600K/yr, however temporarily.

I just thought the fixation on college was humorously extremely accurate and highly subversive.

Are you really using this as evidence that College is Bad? There are a lot more homeless dropouts and college-educated people with successful careers. By your logic, having a 300k/year salary is A Bad Thing cause, well, look where it got this guy!

His point was to illustrate that traditional predictors of success, including even prior success, don't guarantee you anything. He's really proud that his kids were able to receive strong traditional educations that led to college degrees and promising stable careers. How is that subversive?

"His point was to illustrate that traditional predictors of success, including even prior success, don't guarantee you anything"

I'm glad we agree on the subversive part of the story. There is a stereotypical middle class mantra always repeated unthinkingly that college is a universal good the purpose of which is to eat cash and excrete a credential that results in a good job and success, automatically, all the time, for all participants. Exactly the same Pavlovian thought conditioning process in go to church = go to heaven and several other peculiar beliefs.

and now he blogs for degreed.com, a startup focused on breaking the University's strangehold on degrees as an indicator of personal educational outcomes and career potential.

Frightening and strangely inspiring. Definitely worth a read. Right on for his honest and uncompromising view of his own situation.

Unless you're the rare tech entrepreneur getting a lifetime's fortune in a single acquisition event, or the equally rare successful serial entrepreneur, there will be ups and downs and you won't know the outcome until years later. The specifics of what you do today will inevitably become irrelevant even if it's the hottest technology of the moment. Save and continually adapt.

Also, if that's the plan, live WELL below your means. Note that the OP had in fact saved up $500,000 --- a pretty sizable sum of money by most standards. Downsizing earlier and more aggressively (e.g., selling the house while he still could) might conceivably have stretched it out a bit, but the expenses of eight kids living anything close to a middle-class lifestyle are ferocious no matter what you do about it.

$500000 is inadequate sum of money in his circumstances. He was making at least $300000 per year and he should have planned for at least 15 years of unemployment (50 to 65 when his pension kicks in). His saving rate should have been higher but I would not judge somebody with 8 kids for not saving enough for retirement.

So many things in this article don't add up. First, the finances. Second, the two years of intentional unemployment to bring his family back together. Clearly, that didn't work, and he suffered financially because of that. The inability to pay bills and the foreclosure on his home were not immediate - he must have seen his finances dwindle over the period of two years. Then, the estrangement from his family and their lack of financial support for their now homeless father.

While there is probably some value here, most of the important parts are missing and its hard to find sympathy for someone when it seems like the fail happened over the course of many years and was avoidable.

For the sake of fiscal solvency, an argument could be made for not having 8 children and maybe not living in the most expensive place in America. The guy's story is motivational but it seems like a lot of this could have been avoided by not buying into the 'American Dream' hook line and sinker.

I don't know how anyone can justify having 8 kids without having a family farm you're trying to staff.

Is Priceonomics ever going to do anything besides write epic blog posts?

Well, they still have an API: http://priceonomics.com/api/

Very interesting story. I used to frequent Williams Pub in Uptown (the downstairs peanut bar) so it made the story a little more personal for me. My guess is that he will have a few offers for "full-time, permanent employment" as a writer after this essay.

Ah - I forgot which one Williams was until you said "peanut bar"

Go home and hug your bank accounts tonight, folks...

...and then tell them you don't need them ... turn around and then hug your kids and tell them they'll never be your second priority.

This is why I think having a good welfare system encourages entrepreneurship. You can take risks without going homeless.

I agree, but the ironic thing is that most countries with good welfare systems end up being less entrepreneurial and more "salaryman."

E.g. in Norway you don't receive welfare unless you've been actively employed for some years.

I think many entrepreneurs here can attest to similar stories of failures after being in the job market. I was fortunate I have an engineering background, but my skills were very deteriorated .. due to the fact that being a founder pulls your focus, skills and attention in many other areas. I did feel like I took a giant step down from where I was when I left my engineering position to becoming a founder and back.

Was it worth it, NO

Wait, was it what worth it? You stepping down to become a founder?

I wonder if you'll feel the same way in 5 years.

My startup failed about 5 years ago now, and I went and got a real job that was fortunately a step up from where I was before a startup. But for about my first year or two on the job, I felt like I was behind everyone who had joined straight out of college and now knew all the ropes much better than I did.

That flipped after about 2 years at the company, though. By then I knew the company's internal systems as well as anyone else, but I also had this great skill base on how to build things from scratch, how to identify problems that needed fixing without anyone telling me, and how to take initiative and plan out a solution. Many of those skills became invaluable later on, as I started tackling harder problems, while my peers often became frustrated because they were 5+ years out of college and the only thing they'd ever known was how to fix bugs and implement features in one server of one company.

What do mean by the skill base ?

"Skill base" as in all those things you can do but don't even think of as skills, either because you're not using them on a daily or because you assume everyone can do them.

I listed a bunch in the post - "how to build things from scratch, how to identify problems that needed fixing without anyone telling me, and how to take initiative and plan out a solution". Most people who have built things on their own before assume "Duh, anyone should be able to do that" - but the reality is that most people cannot, and there is a painful learning curve and a lot of feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy when they try. The first time I tried to build something on my own, back in college, I certainly floundered around for years until I persevered through and launched it. Many people have not had that experience, and when faced with it, they shy away.

You're possibly right in that I may feel different a few years from now, but going back on the job market was a nightmare. As much as you can prepare theres just a lot that you can't account for from being an engineer working full time on it vs trying to manage people doing it while working on networking, marketing, organizing, etc as well programming with any available cycles left.

Terrifying. But inspiring too.

I rode by a homeless person on the way to work today. This reminds me "there, but for the grace of God, go I". (Substitute whatever you like for the god word: fate, karma, etc.)

Sometimes it is good to be reminded that sometimes sh*t just happens. (And I know, he could have done things differently in terms of life choices, but he also had some really poor luck.)

Wow, quite a story. I wish we saw more like it on HN. Honest and real

Like a chess game, it is not always obvious when you've made a decision that will ultimately cost you the game. Even if it is the only bad decision, and even if the mate comes 2 dozen moves later, you may never realize what it was.

In reflecting how this could have played out differently, it seems that he needed a perspective outside his own circle, even after he had resigned. Not a formal adviser and paid advice, but someone he trusted who could see the increasing peril to his career. Even if the outcome was inevitable, perhaps the landing could have been softer.

I find this especially surreal because I live in Pasadena near San Marino and know most of the places he mentions. We may even have crossed paths. It's also virtually certain that we know at least one person in common, as I have a cousin who held various positions on "Roseanne", including head writer. Come to think of it, I once went to a taping of the show, so we may have crossed paths then, too. Wild. Glad he bounced back.

Incredible story. Heart-breaking and inspiring at the same time. I cannot help but think how many stories were forgotten from that recession.

In my mind, this is an important bug report. Often when you deal with users, the problem is between the keyboard and chair: "The calculations are all wrong!" "Yes, that's because you uploaded an excel spreadsheet with all the wrong numbers..."

But sometimes it isn't the users fault. Sometimes programs crash because you made a coding error. So you fix your code and the users become happy.

To me, this story is the latter. Guy didn't do drugs, isn't a suffering a mental disorder, have a gambling problem, alcoholic and still becomes homeless! Then I think the problem can not be blamed on a user error, but is a system problem. Perhaps this user didn't behave exactly as the system programmers expected, but there still needs to be enough error handling builtin so you don't get homeless from the errors he made.

I mean he quit his job knowing he had eight kids and spent all his money while racking up a huge debt without a good plan to pay it off.

That's not exactly the same as someone who lost his job, got sick, and then became homeless because of crushing medical bills.

Supposedly he tried his best and he seems like a smart person. I think a very large part of the population would have taken even worse decisions in the same situation.

Reading comments in this thread just confirms the old saying that it's easy to be a good general after the battle. But David himself says at the beginning of the text: "I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation."

Of course it's easy to analyze what went wrong after the fact. But it's not easy to see the trends when you're amid them. (Continuously monitoring the ongoing trends is one of the advices in the Book of five rings. A pile of small seemingly incremental changes amounts to a big shift. It's hard to notice them when they happen over an extended period of time.)

"My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children"

I stopped reading there...

Why?

The whole "8 kids" thing is off-putting for a lot of people. It's certainly not a great idea, but I feel that, even for people with few or no children, catastrophic failure is still lurking in the shadows, ready to reach out and drag them into the abyss.

The best thing you can do is acknowledge its presence and build your defenses by prudently saving and spending.

Which part made you uncomfortable? The fact that his wife was cooking for their family or that he had eight kids?

I enjoyed reading his story -- not the actual sequence of events obviously, but in the telling. It bears some similarities to "The Jerk" and "Life Stinks" but it could be a worthwhile movie (hope I didn't jinx it.)

Some things I might have done differently --

1) Left LA for someplace cheaper once I decided to take the sabbatical.

2) Not have eight children. Four would have been plenty.

As others have pointed out, most who flock to LA to work in entertainment leave without much to show for it except a healthy dose of cynicism.

How many jobs did he apply for which he was well qualified? The "economy" failed this guy, not the other way around. And under no circumstances should people end up homeless. There are too many empty homes. I will go so far as to say that no one should have to take charity from family or community in order to have some type of home, regardless of their income.

This is a very sick and outdated Social Darwinistic society we have.

The structure is the problem.

I wonder how much this fellow paid in Social Security taxes over the years. I don't understand why people can't use their own resources when they need them, rather than when other people think they need them.

The rules of a 401K and IRAs allow you to borrow from your own retirement funds (albeit with penalty if not paid back within a certain window). It seems like that would be more desirable than the funds being untouchable.

The concept of social security as a form of investment/retirement account is a bit of a misconception. In reality, your immediate payments into social security are for the current population that is elderly or disabled. The "promise" of social security is that when you're elderly or disabled, you'll benefit from the system. It's a slight but important difference.

That said, he may have qualified for some sort of federal or state assistance while he was in this state.

Takeaway: socio-cultural is the most important sort... Without a large baggage of skills to bounce back on, this story would not have ended the same way.

Oops - the missing word after "socio-cultural" is "capital" !

To solve a resume gap, just say you were a consultant.

To make sure it's truthful, get a few gigs, no matter how low-paid (this guy did). If you're likely, some of the customers will serve be willing to serve as references.

Most interviewers will not ask much about what you did as a consultant. You can tell them truthfully about the gigs. No interviewers will ask exactly how many hours a week you were billing.

It seems to me that he did not plan appropriately. He invested and what not, but it seems to me he could have just been doing a part time job the entire time he was in "the gap" and he would have been fine.

Further, eight kids...

He seems nice, just planned VERY poorly. Also, kudos for him tugging back from homelessness. I am impressed.

A grad student at Duke, who lived in a van

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/ken-ilgun...

Just picked up the book, anyone else?

Who paid for the 6 kids college?

(I enjoyed the story and feel tons of compassion for him. But there do seem to be some unexplained factual gaps in the story that my brain wants to make sense of. Who paid for college is the main question I haven't seen anyone else mention yet).

Wow. There're experiences that you may think of but never really anticipate to encounter. For me it was feeling shame for buying a Kindle edition of the book. But I really want to read it and if so I need to buy it in the Kindle form.

It's a good story, people should think about the fail carefully before commit to a startup. I shall read this story 1 year before, it's too late to think about it when you are facing it.

For those who would like to help him, the most direct way is to buy and then review his book on Amazon. He will receive more money for the paper edition than for the Kindle.

IMHO, stories like these have the effect of people who should feel really really comfortable financially continue to work hard (aka paying underlings as little as possible).

What stood out to me about this is how well-written it is. I hope someone in a position to hire a writer reads this and recognizes his talent.

Barring living in a socialist utopia, I wouldn't dare to have even one child without being independently wealthy, let alone 8.

Priceonomics should hire this guy. I wouldn't doubt he would dedicate himself to writing stories such at these.

Bought the book, I hope most of the money goes to him... but I doubt it

A great and enlightening story! But 8 children...?! Come on!

for anyone looking, his twitter is: https://twitter.com/davidraether

While this is up, does anyone know what happened to the Priceonomics search bar?

I'm guessing they decided to be an economics blog full time.

They discussed this before but I can't find the link. Priceonomics has started consulting on data analysis and visualization and make significantly more money doing that than they do with their price search tools.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6590041

Just bought his book.

He didn't really fail; he stumbled, and got back up.

This is a very sad story. Even more sadly, it reflects many similar stories.

All this calamity for this family of 10 came from bad planning. This guy had a career that would have likely lasted until retirement, but he took a risk and quit it. That was a smallish risk, not nearly the risk he took while in his next job.

He admits that writers careers don't usually don't last into their 50s. Why did he not save more money so he could retire early? Why did he choose to have more and more children? Why did he not position himself for transition into another job as his writing career progressed? Why did he just quit without having another (less demanding) job lined up?

He was making upwards of a million dollars a year at one point. I had some neighbors while growing up in the 90s, they had 8 kids too and their father probably make 2-3 million dollars over his entire life. They were never homeless (in fact they had a pretty nice 5bd house), never hungry, cold, had decently new cars and clothes, ETC. This guy blew his wad all at once like a pro athlete.

All bad choices.

After his job, why did they not cut back on their spending? They should have downsized and cut back dramatically rather than continuing their expensive lifestyle.

At the time he quit, he was probably worth over 2 million dollars Add half a million that they borrowed after that and you still can't make that last more than 6 years?

I know someone who did something similar. The person that I know took a couple of years off like this. He got so used to it that when he started looking for a job again - it was half-assed (he was spoiled with still living lavish on savings and not having to work). He sabotaged many interviews, turned down some for bogus reasons and when he got jobs, he could not keep them for long (self sabotage again). It was like he was mentally ready for retirement already, but he was only 40.

It is a sad story, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who has grossed over 10 million dollars over his lifetime but squandered it.

> All this calamity for this family of 10 came from bad planning. This guy had a career that would have likely lasted until retirement, but he took a risk and quit it. That was a smallish risk, not nearly the risk he took while in his next job.

To be fair his career would have quit him shortly after he quit it. The industry changed.

True but remember being in the game makes a whole lot difference, than entering it after a break. To add to that you are old so you are facing age discrimination issues.

If he had stuck to his job, he would atleast noticed the change in trends so could have changed to something better.

Did you advise him to stop?

Well he admits that he made bad choices. Obviously quitting his job was a bad choice - though I have spent several years around Hollywood folks and social norms regarding work amongst entertainment industry people in LA are a little different from the rest of us. There is a lot of pressure to show off your success - not always with flashy things but for the older guys, with freedom. Giving off the illusion of an early retirement is a status symbol with these guys. I'd say that factored into his thinking quite a bit - he wanted to show off that he could take a break like the other guys but ignored the fact that he had 8 children to feed. If he didn't have 8 kids he probably could have pulled it off even if he never found a job again.

And I've been in the situation where I had a comfy lifestyle and the income source to support it drops off. Its hard to let go of these things, your emotions get in the way. Scaling back is admitting failure, its damaging to the ego. So you ignore the warning signs and keep on living at the same standards - you keep the house, the car, go out for fancy meals with your friends etc like always. Meanwhile the debt racks up and up, but hey you have the credit to cover it. And you'll get the money back again soon, so don't worry. Until you don't, and shit hits the fan and one day you're packing up the house and living out of your car. Its of course his fault, but people don't always operate on logic

I feel like the "fuck you, I've got mine" culture of Hollywood and, thanks to the VCs, also the Valley leads this way for a lot of talented, creative people (such as OP). The problem is that no one thinks age discrimination will happen to them, and people who've realized that it can and does have been rendered irrelevant.

Also, I know that a lot of people will think that this is a shitty thing to say, but it's just the truth, so here goes. Unless you have dynastic wealth (and various generational protections against losing it, such as trust funds that skip a generation) having 8 kids is just fucking irresponsible. You're betting on 5+ of them being 150+ IQ types who can make it on their own without top schools and bought connections, and that's just not a reasonable bet no matter how good your genes may be. Sorry, but them's truth. I'm not sure I can even condone bringing one child into this fucked-up, horrible society. I certainly wouldn't even consider it if I lived in the ex-hippie-now-hypocrite fuck-you-I've-got-mine paradise of Hollywood/Silicon Valley.

This guy WAS one of the I've got mine people. He is self described as a rock star type. He made many millions of dollars. I have knows middle class families who have not only raised 8 kids, but have retired and maintain the same standard of living on LESS money than this guy made in two of his peak (one million dollar) years. Having eh 8 kids is not the irresponsible part when you have made upwards of ten million dollars in your life. That much should be crystal clear (the money was squandered).

Lesson: Don't have eight kids.

this was the only thing i could think throughout the whole article.

of course it makes no practical or moral sense to discuss after the fact, and his tale is both cautionary and oddly inspiring; but ultimately the entire situation could have been side-stepped with a bit of family planning.

it definitely has a parallel, if even less acknowledged, in the wider world.

Honestly, with 8 kids, what kind of job do you expect to have that doesn't take the majority of your time up? It will either be one long job or a regular job and a night job.

"All of our children do as well. Germany has a stronger social safety net, so she decided to return with our two youngest daughters. They spent their high school years there and received a great education"

This part doesn't make sense to me. So his wife would rather divorce, which is even more unhealthy for the children because there is no dad around to utilize a safety net than have a husband with a job with long hours. He was making $600,000/year. This is enough to support them for many years.

His wife sounds like the selfish one and this was all an excuse to go back to Germany. Many women want the family and the money, but don't realize the time and sacrifice that it actually takes to get it.

"Since I moved to the Bay Area, I’ve worked on two startups. I had a substantial equity stake in one of them and was promised an equity stake in the other once the next round of financing came through."

Good story. And sad. But still not following Mom's advice and betting on something that has a very small chance of success.

I wonder how much salary he is giving up to get that lottery ticket?

There always is the possibility that startups are the only place that would accept a homeless guy with little experience.

He seems to have writing skills, which is a useful skill, but with very little "resume fluff" to prove it. A white-collar job looks down upon even 6-months of unemployment... seeing years and years of unemployment / odd jobs is just a giant red mark.

Even if someone is fully qualified, you are simply going to favor the resume with a "solid work history" over someone with a whole bunch of holes.

Startups on the other hand, cannot afford that luxury. They often need the skills immediately and don't about those sorts of matters as much.

That's true. He also mentions that "So full-time, permanent employment in a real company with actual revenues is still an elusive prey."

That was my take as well. It seems he wants that long-term, corporate job, but it's just not there for the taking. The startups seemed to be the step-up from the Craigslist gigs.

He's got several years as a staff writer on a hit TV show, and his magazine publishing experience before that. The gap is real, and obviously important, but what came before is a lot more than "fluff".

He is _MISSING_ fluff. He just needs some job, ANY job that proves that he wasn't wasting his time during the gap.

He clearly has real world working experience. But any resume that is missing out on even a couple of months worth of experience signals a red flag to me.

This is the culture of corporate America. Holes are EXTREMELY bad in your resume. Period.

I'm curious as to why holes are so bad in the eyes of an employer?

Is it a fear of non-compliance?

There is no logic in it. Holes are bad because holes are bad. I'm sure I can make up a reason for you, but IMO, its better to cut out the bullshit and just tell it to you straight.

Holes in a resume are bad because most people who look at resumes think that holes are a bad thing. Its simply the bias that exists in most jobs (that I've come across... anyway)

It suggests that:

you are a lazy piece of shit

you were incarcerated for bank robbery

you were on the run from the Feds living in Argentina

you went to Pakistan to attend a Jihadist training course (BTEC-diploma)

you were kidnapped by aliens and given daily anal probes (that never impresses the interviewers)

you were being trained in cutting-edge industrial espionage techniques by a rival company of the interviewer

you spent the time going through sex-reassignment procedures and changed your name to Gladys

you worked for the NSA

The average interviewer will think all of the above and more in the space of two milliseconds, whether any of these delusional thoughts have any basis in reality.

> There always is the possibility that startups are the only place that would accept a homeless guy with little experience.

From reading HN I get the impression he'd have very little chance because of his age. This guy has white hair, and posters here seem to think that over 26 is past it.

While the ageism of the startup scene is legendary, I think it's incredibly myopic. The assumption seems to be that older people who are hardworking and exceptionally intelligent are likely not to be conversant with the latest technology/programming language du jour and therefore have nothing to offer. I also wonder if startups feel that they can more easily exploit younger workers with airy, hand-wavey promises of future payoffs that older workers would be less likely to accept.

"seeing years and years of unemployment / odd jobs is just a giant red mark."

Guess what? In that case you have to be smart enough, for survival purposes, to make something up. For god's sake you can say you are a consultant. Or say you worked at a company that recently went out of business. And if you get caught later? Who cares by then you will have hopefully used it as a stepping stone to something else. Of course if you want to be honest you can continue to live on the street and hope for the best.

I am not doubting that it is difficult if you are living w/o a home to present an image that is consistent with that (so maybe you need to get a job care taking a property in order to have a place to live and using a po box) but it is not impossible. Very hard but not impossible.

"Profile. larrys. about: public relations, marketing.

Suggestion: Lie."

or maybe survival? Lol some bullshit bias against holes and some guy tries to survive and it's said and done in your eyes. profile:jodrellblank tow-the-line drone

You're both right. He's suggesting to lie for survival.

Nonetheless, it is lying, and that has its own risks associated with it. Beyond honor, if people notice that you are lying on your resume, you start getting added to blacklists and those blacklists start spreading around.

You see, if you fail the typical interview, you are simply not hired. If you LIE in the typical interview, and the interviewer notices it, you may be banned for life from that company.

This is doubly-so for consultants. Consultants are sold based on their resume. IE: They may have found a Government Contract position that requires 3 years of experience, and naturally... they'll then look for people with 3 years of experience. They may be put in a very perilous legal position, and their Government Contract may be terminated. You aren't only putting yourself at risk here, but also the company that just hired you.

PS: its much much worse now that Mr. Snowden ruined it all for Contractors without a degree and little experience. Mr. Snowden has been cited explicitly as a case WHY you don't hire non-graduates.

http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/15200/blacklist...

http://www.hazards.org/victimisation/bigliars.htm

Putting words in my mouth, and a personal attack?

Where did I say anything about the bias, resume holes, people trying to survive, or judgement of the unemployed person, exactly?

From the article:

"Sir, are you sure you want stack loaves of bread here at Trader Joe’s? Yes, I really do. Well, we’ve decided to hire the 24 year-old woman with purple hair and nose piercings instead."

He tried to get more traditional jobs, but they don't want him.

Jobs are hard to find. No doubt. But the truth is of course the manager at Trader Joe's knows he's not going to stick around for a long time. If you do hiring (in a traditional business) you will always run across people who are desperate and overqualified. They will tell you anything and everything to get the job. But a business is not a charity it's a business. And it needs to hire the person that (from experience) will stick around more than a short period of time. Doesn't mean the manager was right about him. But we have to assume that his judgement was based on what he ran into in the past in similar situations.

And the example he is giving is for dramatic effect anyway. We have no statistics on how many jobs he applied for that he was overqualified for but more on the mark that made sense for the person hiring (like writing for priceonomics on a per article basis).

"knows he's not going to stick around for a long time."

Why? I worked my way thru school in retail and then a short stint in retail management (long enough to learn I'm not doing that for a living if there's any way to avoid it...)

So our annual turnover rate ranged from 100% to 200% and this was not considered noteworthy in the biz. Retail is not like working for Ma Bell for 40 years and retiring in place. This dude was unemployed and/or homeless for what, like 5 years, at what point do you think a retail manager will think, hmm, he's been unemployed 10 times longer than the average employee lasts here, maybe, just maybe, he's going to stick around?

The other pure bogosity is I actually worked retail management and my three favorite employees were a carpenter and two accountants. God knows he wouldn't be the first dude trying to work a second job part time nights to make ends meet, and managers love to hire a guy (or woman) who the boyz will look up to as something of a parental figure or at least older bro figure (basically they were team leads working under me). High school kids were a dime a dozen but the store really rose or fell based on the adults...

You never, ever hire some high school or college student slacker if you can get a real dude with a real work ethic. Strange claims from people who haven't been there, while I have been there, strike a discordant tone.

Gotta be some "other" issues. Such as maybe 100 other applicants in the same situation who did get hired. Perhaps this "Rosanne" show writer didn't get hired because they hired a dude from the "Cosby show" or 100 other guys in the same situation.

I guarantee he didn't get hired because the kids would obey him like a parent, or because he had too intense of a work ethic, or too much life experience, or too focused on the prize aka paycheck.

But the truth is of course the manager at Trader Joe's knows he's not going to stick around for a long time.

You're right on average. Interestingly, one of the part-timers at my local (Menlo Park) Trader Joe's is apparently a retired multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur. He does it just to be around friendly people for part of his day.

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