I'm doing the opposite - doing unpaid work for a local hackspace like caring about the local non-profit mesh network and doing it-stuff for a local university group.
People just don't seem to grasp the concept at all: a lot ask why we run the mesh network and how we finance it - if you explain them it's run for free and there is no profit motive they think you are crazy. It's also surprisingly popular to assume for free = useless - some declined running a node due to this.
On the other hand working for free in uni context is basically self-slaverly - lot's of work, lot's of stuff breaks constantly if you run your typical FOSS stuff and nobody is seeing the work and most don't care or at worst you are blamed and new people advocating their favorite commercial cloud services.
It's still fun and I can learn a lot, run some infrastructure for free where I can test stuff but you really need to be careful to not foul yourself and depending on the org you are in to not just work for free.
The saddest thing about the university thing is: If you advocate to pay that position a lot of - I'm just blunt here: "rich kids" advocate against it because you are at uni anyway and they tell you it's an honour to do this... however if they don't get refund for partly insane travel costs for their university pet project hell breaks loose...
> If you advocate to pay that position a lot of - I'm just blunt here: "rich kids" advocate against it because you are at uni anyway and they tell you it's an honour to do this... however if they don't get refund for partly insane travel costs for their university pet project hell breaks loose...
I hate this dynamic so much. I was in a cybersecurity club (back before every school had a program) and the school fought tooth and nail for every dime they gave us. We got reimbursed for a rental car and hotel once a year for a particular red team/blue team competition and that was it (and a certain professor was the only reason we got reimbursed). The bus going to take "activists" to protest at occupy wall street (or whatever) was paid for no questions asked.
I hate the school systems hero worship of sign wielding protesters. I remember the first time few times I went to protests.
Idiot teenagers there to hang out with friends and skip school. NIMBYs there for completely different reasons than they were nominally protesting. Said NIMBYs arming teens with homemade signs which were promptly disposed of after 1 hour. Career protestors without jobs roaming from one protest to another. News crews long jaded to the reality of protests having their eyes roll out of their skulls watching said teenagers screw around. Then I watched the news regarding the same protest and it was like entering a damn reality distortion field where some narrative about the next generation of youth activists were deciding to do all this shit on their own and their NIMBY parents didn't organize the whole thing and coach their kids on what to say.
The one protest that really jaded me was being part of protests for an olympic bid and seeing absolutely nobody. Jack shit people protested. Moment the worlds media showed up to town? Oh all sorts of "activists" concerned about "the government prioritizing a party over X cause" creating a fuss when all the money was already fucking spent. "Activists" telling tourists to stay away that could help us recoup some costs because that would somehow help the poor. "Activists" vandalizing olympic related stuff daily. "Activists" getting piss drunk, overdosing on opiates, and setting up homeless camps. Then the media and school system distorted these people into everyday heroes.
>I hate the school systems hero worship of sign wielding protesters.
The part that really irks me about this is that it incentivizes "activism" in high school as a means to look good on college applications. There's a reason we don't let high-school kids vote. Likewise giving them an incentive to play the "think of the children" card on politicians is just an exercise in manipulating them. Basically nobody at age 18 has a reasonable world view because their life experience is basically limited to childhood, they only know some output of what the adults around them have fed them.
When I was learning photojournalism (as a side skill), for practice, I used to attend lots of demonstrations in Boston, and the demonstrators always seemed to be sincere.
The students (of which Boston has a ton) might have been attending different demonstrations: I mostly saw non-student adults.
Occasionally, a demonstration coordinated by a particular activism group would seem transactional: people show up and assemble, media comes out to get what might air as a few seconds of video, people leave. But even those ones, the people seemed to be sincere.
Regarding schools incentivizing "activism": that's frustrating, but not entirely new. Added to the widely-gamed college application checklist, long after "volunteering"? (I could never review college admissions applications. You can't even get mad at even the most insincere-seeming students for playing the game, since that was the game the schools put in front of them. The solution might be to not have it be a competition for scarce resources, since it no longer has to be.)
> Basically nobody at age 18 has a reasonable world view because their life experience is basically limited to childhood
It's fair to criticize teens for limited experience. It's fair to assume a some portion of what they think they know is a reflection of the common wisdom of adults in their circle. It's fair to start from the assumption that this will often result in opinions that aren't very nuanced, systematic, and balanced.
It's risky to assume this means teens have no meaningful experience, knowledge, or even expertise.
And I'm at least a little surprised to see an opinion approaching that on a forum where no small number of participants started playing/working at creating software before they reached an age expressed in double-digits.
Campus activism is a strange thing because universities are filled with young people who don't really know what they're doing, what they really care about, what they truly believe, and how they relate to society as a whole.
It's unfortunate that this is many people's first interaction with protests and activism, because it's a very unique portion of it and not at all representative of protest movements in general or of what they could be.
Of course they do. That's their direct leverage against those who actually need money to live on. You don't need to be smarter - you just need to work for free. At the end of their degree they'll be the ones with an interesting portfolio and poorer won't.
I certainly believe you that it is not possible to make a living in most sports. My point was that an amateur-only rule is a big advantage for athletes who don't need to work and excludes many who might be able to earn money in an Olympic sport.
Told that on Reddit few days ago. 70yo neighbor asked me to fix her laptop antivirus[0]. The thing was sluggish. I came back the following day (unsollicited) to show her a live linux so she can see her laptop full speed (no hdd or os cruft). When i left she asked me how much i wanted.
Social tissue is an odd beast. Friendliness is fragile and people dont like freebies. Also i suspect some Stockholm syndrom, since every aftersales ask a lot, they assume anything must cost a ton.
[0] which she paid for when things were back in order.
I had this experience in the early 00s. I helped quite a few (of my parents) neighbors with PC and Windows-related problems. It didn't bother me to do it for free, I offered everything for free. One of their neighbors was, at the time, a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. His power supply was on it's last leg and he was dealing with his machine randomly crashing. I swapped in an unused PSU that I had at the house and he couldn't believe that I didn't want to charge him $200 or something.
These days I'm lucky to even see my neighbors or get a friendly "Hello" back from them.
"These days I'm lucky to even see my neighbors or get a friendly "Hello" back from them."
this is why i very very reluctantly accept anything for free. Even if the person claims to "just being nice" there's an implied debt just like you state here.
I would much rather barter or pay cash up front and square the deal than breed resentment or the awkward "hey I need you to do something for me because you owe me.." conversation.
This is exactly the root of the problem, it's so ingrained in our culture that everything has to be done "for something" that you can't even grasp that someone might want to do or give something without asking anything in return. I do a lot of things or give without expecting even thankfulness.
I don’t know if it’s “our culture”, it’s part of it but personality also comes into play.
If you spend time and effort doing something for someone and expect nothing in return it’s only natural that many people will feel uncomfortable unless they believe they understand why you’re doing it. It’s not necessarily transactional; understanding the motives of others is how people make sense of human interaction. Their understanding doesn’t have to be correct! It just has to make sense to them somehow.
Some possible reasons a person is doing a thing for me:
* They like me, we’re friends
* They like doing the thing or keeping busy
* They have a religion (Christianity, GNU/Linux)
* They like to feel helpful or useful, to teach or to demonstrate expertise
* We have a group bond (church, neighbourhood, club, etc)
* They’re doing me a favour. I’m a useful person and I’ll be able to do them a good turn in future.
* They owe me something (loyalty, money) and they’re paying me back by doing this
* They’re trying to rip me off somehow or get something out of me
* I’m incapable and they judge that I’m clearly in need of help (charity)
More self-reliant people are the ones who seem reluctant to accept free help. I think it actually hurts their pride a little to have to rely on you and not be able to give something in return. Accepting some jars of jam or a bit of money in return seems like a kindness.
I had many motives. I'm annoyed at society race for new and shiney when you don't have to. It was part of the reason the interaction wasn't super neat because it was a bit of a foggy subtext. Now it wasn't all, I wanted to show her what was possible with her machine, and relieve her of stress. But it's true that when we spend time with people, the faster you make sure there's no hidden agenda from your side, the better. I believe if your mind and heart is clear, people will follow rapidly. It's a trust issue.
> Even if the person claims to "just being nice" there's an implied debt just like you state here.
If someone gives me something for free, I have no problem accepting it on those terms and feel no implied debt. Probably because when I do/give things to others for free, I never feel that person owes me anything more than a "thank you."
I have encountered people who've done things for me with an expectation that I somehow owe them something, but I consider them as subverting basic social interactions, and will reduce my interactions with them.
I read that as a separate thought. When he was younger he knew his neighbors and helped them freely. Now neighbors don't introduce themselves. I could be wrong.
The thoughts were were loosely connected, but I wouldn't read too much into anything that I write (especially that early in the morning).
Mostly, I think it's that I'm sentimental and nostalgic for the period of time that I grew up in. It felt like, back then, in that time and that place, that people were genuinely neighborly and helpful for a sense of the greater good. I could rattle off hundreds of instances of personally helping neighbors out, as my parents did, and as other neighbors and family friends did to us in kind, and at least for my piece, I didn't expect a debt to be repaid and I never felt that coming from others.
Maybe it's just my own naivety speaking. Maybe people genuinely did implicitly create a debt in their heads for those favors or deeds. I don't think they did, but I don't really know. I do know that, by the time that computers were a household commodity, and I was able to help folks with theirs, that they absolutely expected to have to pay for _that_ sort of service.
More recently, I've only had the opportunity to help 2 or 3 people through all of the 2010s. Each of them were friends, or people that I was trying to cultivate a friendship with (it wasn't reciprocated, but that's fine, too). I've known the names of exactly 3 families that I've lived literally next door to since moving to California in 2008.
I suppose that I'm just longing for the loss of something that I can't quite explain nor properly articulate on a work day.
You know it took me a long time to understand this part of human nature and social interactions. And I believe it's one of the deepest force behind all the technological change and society evolution. We want to be able to do more without feeling indebted to someone. Today it's reached the point where we almost don't want to owe a hello to a cashier at McDonald's. We want to deal less and less with the potential randomness of people.
I believe we're doing away with the art of trust and replace it with a computerized world.
as long as it doesn’t spiral out of control into dependency, my normal response to someone demanding to pay me for some kindness i’ve done them is either a request for payment in kind (“you know, those pies you bake sometimes always smell delicious from next door...”, “hey, you’re an IPA guy right?”, etc.) or a request to pass it on and report back what they helped someone else with.
I don’t need to take money from neighbors, but i known how itchy it is to feel like you owe someone a debt, and there’s a barter/trade solution that works nicely here and is somehow fundamentally more human.
> I don’t need to take money from neighbors, but i known how itchy it is to feel like you owe someone a debt, and there’s a barter/trade solution that works nicely here and is somehow fundamentally more human.
This perfectly sums it up. There a human component we almost completely lost. Kindness has been made obsolete by money, or so it feels. But that's also a part of humanness that was traded away.
IIRC Graeber wrote quite a bit about how a kind of fuzzily-accounted, low-level, shifting, mutual debt can be a big part of close human relationships (relatives, friends) in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I recall in particular his using the example of a child "paying off" all perceived debt to a parent as a way of severing ties with them.
There are parts of the world in which paying off everything you owe to, say, a business partner, is a polite way of saying "i am about to cease doing business with you".
My experience from teenage/early adulthood as well. Neighbours knew I was the local "computer whiz", so they'd come to me and ask to fix / "devirus" their computers. They always tried to give me money, no matter how much I opposed.
They know they'd spend a small fortune at Best Buy or other retail service. And they don't want to be seen as a charity case or perhaps worse, a dummy.
I feel like a simple barter might be appropriate in this case. IT services for brownies. Or something like that. You still get the satisfaction of helping a neighbor and they get the satisfaction of paying you something, anything, for your time and knowledge.
I think this is a really important thing to realise, socially. People feel happy doing things for you. In a misguided attempt to be polite I used to turn down things people offered me even though I wanted them: drinks when I visited, lifts in a car, etc. Eventually I realised I was just making them more uncomfortable and that everyone wins if you accept.
That's a very important life lesson. Many people live unconsciously by a code of mutual obligation -- they will do something for you, motivated by feelings they would identify as generosity, expecting nothing immediately in return. It's rude to turn them down. They'll be hurt and feel rejected. At the same time you need to be aware that it's incumbent on you to return the favor eventually, in some form. I've seen a lot of, on the one hand, resentful feelings and on the other, baffled incomprehension, result when people who live by this code interact with people who don't.
This is culture-specific! I know a couple of cultures where it's polite to offer (without actual intention of following through), and the expectation is that the person being asked also declines - out of politeness. Think of it as the equivalent of the American "How are you?" scripted exchange.
I think India has (or had) a three level rules where the first 3 queries were just polite to show some kind of friendliness. After that your in honest/genuine interactions.
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. The very same real world also contains offers that are customary given on the assumption that the other side says "thank you very much I will surely come back to you about this" as part of a politeness protocol but never even considers taking the offer seriously. "Please stay as long as you like" is how the last guests of a party thrown out.
I find that highlighting how asking for help meets the need of community and support, while providing it meets the need of contributing to life.
Both sides got their needs met. Everything else is extra. People aren't learning how to be grateful for themselves and their own vulnerability. I'm not going to take away that learning opportunity, especially by accepting things from them I don't want or need.
In my case what was odd is that I came on my own, she sollicited my help for the antivirus and paid me. I came back without her asking, just so she knows her machine is fine and there's no reason to worry or buy a new one.
Business shark me should have ride her fear and give her paid advice for a new machine while giving her a free 'recycling' service on her current laptop.
Remind your business shark that in the accounting world, "good will" is an acknowledged asset class that exists. It's not always a good idea to "monetize" all of it, even from a strictly homo econimus business shark point of view.
> in the accounting world, "good will" is an acknowledged asset class that exists. It's not always a good idea to "monetize" all of it, even from a strictly homo econ[omic]us business shark point of view.
Is this true? I'm familiar with an accounting concept called "goodwill", but as far as I ever learned "goodwill" is just the label given to prices that are higher than the fundamentals appear to justify. By that definition, in order for goodwill to exist, it must already have been monetized.
I basically eventually set a rate for this, mostly because people kept asking. And because I both wanted to address people trying to give me as much as a Best Buy, and those who somehow still thought five dollars was useful in this day and age.
I think the part that's thought of as 'crazy', isn't that it's all done as charity, it's that it's the only thing supporting it. Having an idea or project that can do some social good or meet some demand is great, but it's even better when that thing can sustain itself. It might,for a time, work on charity, but akin to the 'teach a man to fish' proverb - it's better something can meet it's own requirements than expecting to feed that fire for x years or Eg. to feed / find someone to feed a person for the next x years.
Don't get me wrong - All power to you, donating your time effort and other resources to things you believe to be a worthy cause is what people should be doing. But some of that effort may be wisely spent on finding ways to monetize those actions and set it up to carry its own weight.
So instead of being dependent on good will, you wish to be dependent on paying customers? (This is a strategy where customers carry the weight, not the project, as you've described)
I, personally, would rather my humanitarian efforts incentivize the cultivation of good will, as opposed to the cultivation of money.
I, personally, would rather my humanitarian efforts incentivize the cultivation of good will, as opposed to the cultivation of money.
Good relations with customers often involve the cultivation of good will. That used to be an article of faith in the SV startup community and on this site. The cultivation of good will (not fanboy/fangirl-ism) is a sign that a group is doing real good in the world, where the money is a strong validation.
Inexpensive every-person pastimes and products also used to fit this pattern. The ready availability of those used to elevate most everyone in American society to a certain level of dignity. It seems like there's fewer of those as time goes on.
we take donations for the mesh-network and organize events with the money and stuff like that - it's not totally without money - some do consulting if asked but we want to keep network non-profit because most users don't have much money.
I think this might be an american phenomenon. I live in Germany and almost everyone I know is doing some non-profit work on the side, it's pretty common here.
It is not. The people of the United States give not only the most money to charity in the world per capita, but also score very highly on World Giving Index (we are #2), which accounts for time spent helping others and working for charitable organizations. We are a very charity oriented country.
I've always heard that that's predominantly religious giving, but never actually looked to see whether that's true til now.
It turns out, it is:
> Historically, Religious groups have received the largest share of charitable donations. This remained true in 2016. With the 2.9% increase in donations this year, 31% of all donations, or $127.37 billion, went to Religious organizations. Much of these contributions can be attributed to people giving to their local place of worship.
> In 2016, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (32%), education (16%), human services (12%), grantmaking foundations (11%), and health (9%).
So Americans technically give a lot to charity, but it's mostly to tax-advantaged local religious institutions, who may or may not be doing anything with that; I'm sure some churches do something for their local community to merit that tax advantage, but I'm sure others don't. There's a lot of big buildings out there with crosses on them.
It is a tithe because it is a percentage of income that goes to the church. But it’s implemented through a tax collected by the government and withheld from paychecks. It would be unconstitutional in the U.S., but it’s a thing in Germany and some Scandinavian countries.
You mean the churches that, in turn, use that money to help their communities in a charitable way? I doubt that would surprise anyone anywhere in the world, since it happens everywhere.
This is a thing I've seen said a lot, but I'm curious if it's been studied. And I don't mean this as snark, but has anyone looked at what kind of "good works" churches do for their local communities?
I'm very curious to know whether our government (state, local, etc) is getting a fair exchange for the tax benefits of being a church.
> And I don't mean this as snark, but has anyone looked at what kind of "good works" churches do for their local communities?
Well - some of them provide political platforms to inform their members who to vote for. I think the IRS looked into this at one point, though it didn't go that well [1].
[1]: To this day, it's claimed that it was partisan and targeted only one party, when in fact all non-profits were looked into; it was just that certain non-profits, which attracted members of mainly one party, were the ones mostly engaging in such practices. That party, of course, made sure the IRS didn't have somebody (by not confirming anyone to the position - which is still the same today) to look into this issue; without that person, the law has no teeth, and they can continue to (illegally) promote their own politicians, in violation of the law for non-profit organizations. But they claim "free speech" rights and "religious freedom" rights...
Many replies are vouching for churches, but while religious community work is certainly beneficial to selected parties, it's only a little better than other forms of private philanthropy in that the services are selected by a limited number of participants, to benefit a limited number of participants, rather than democratically as a government would do. [-1]
For example, in cases like the Salvation Army, a portion of donated money goes toward lobbying against certain types of free speech. And they have been caught many times discriminating against LGBTQ. [0]
[-1] Not that governments are uniformly perfect. They are at least beholden to the majority at numerous pressure points, unlike churches.
And some of that goes out to support their surrounding communities by feeding/clothing homeless, supporting foster children, cleaning up yards for the elderly, paying people's rent, etc. A lot of churches don't require people to members in order to receive this help.
There are estimates that the Catholic Church spends around 3% of turnover on charity - which is far less than most charitable organisations do, and certainly far less than it could afford to.
Given the age slant of its members a lot of donations are collected from the elderly, many of whom can realistically be considered poor themselves.
The US has the highest level of wealth inequality in the world, so assuming that the ultra-rich donate more, their impact should be higher in the US than anywhere else.
I think I want income inequality. Wealth inequality might be totally meaningless as wealth is guesstimate not exact value usually, e.g. look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribut..., is hard to say anything at all from Gini Wealth. Zimbabwe and Denmark can be compared by Gini index but that's completely nonsensical result: one corrupt and one happiest country in the world.
I have mentioned law of large numbers because of population size, however rich ultra-rich might be that can't skew results in USA.
Americans are expected to do unpaid internships as well, but instead of being supplemented by government-paid tuition and a stipend, we have to get financing from a college fund (if our parents are well-off) and/or student loans (which we'll be paying off well into middle age).
i have a pretty calvinist background, so i may be poorly calibrated.
whats wrong with that? i create therefore i am. what else would you live for - consumption? comfort? to be there so no one else marks your territory? genuinely curious.
i have a pretty anti-calvinist, though thoroughly religious, background.
What's wrong with that is that Work is not God, and therefore cannot be that which justifies you (and in fact, you justify it!). Taken to extremes, work-as-that-which-i-live-for is a not very subtle idolatry, and that usually winds us up in boot-stomping-on-face-forever territory in more or less short order.
I mean this in the least greeting-card-glurgey way possible: The thing we live for isn't work, it is love.
...This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent "Gospel of work", showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one.
Such a concept practically does away with the very basis of the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done. This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of tbe value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work.
What do you need to live "for" something? I haven't yet reached retirement so it's pure speculation, but I suspect having no obligations and just hanging is pretty good. Maybe not great, but to me it looks better than the world of work for pay.
BTW I looks to me that my view is in the majority - I don't have the data, but I think that the majority of people just stop working after they reach retirement - i.e. they stop paid work as soon as they can (which means that doing nothing is better than work for them).
> It's also surprisingly popular to assume for free = useless
> I can test stuff but you really need to be careful to not foul yourself
Everything has a cost, even free ones. The cost isn't always money, it can be time, trouble, lost opportunities, lack of support, reselling of semi-private data, advertising, lack of maintenance, etc...
Social pressure on this is also ridiculous. Every time you start doing things, even if you actually stick to it as a hobby to make you happy, people, inc. family, will go "but you could make money out of this".
Don't fall for it. Most of us will not be able to do money from art, from photography, from aikido. Enjoy it, do it for your own sake, to balance your life.
My wife was musing on her photography hobby the other night. She really enjoys it, and was thinking, "I really wish I could make this my job."
I told her that I'm really happy that photography makes her happy, but that there's no way she'll make much money doing it and she already knows that. It would make life more stressful and ruin the fun she now enjoys. And since I once tried turning a creative hobby into freelance work, she knows I'm telling her the truth from my own experience. I wouldn't want to tell the most important person in my life some BS flattery--if I'm really going to support her, I have to be totally honest.
I like bicycle stuff quite a bit. Riding bikes, working on bikes, etc. But, it's not my job... I do IT stuff.
This past weekend there was a bunch of bike maintenance to be done. Swapping parts around, cleaning things, fixing stuff... It all kinda came to a head yesterday morning where I very clearly thought "this is fun, but I'm VERY glad this isn't my job -- this is a lot of fiddly work".
It's very common for folks to try to turn their hobbies into a job, only to have that realization too late. I feel fortunate to have had that realization before considering it.
Absolutely. As one of our great American sages recognized, "It's only work if somebody makes you do it"[0].
The corollary being that a hobby can stop being fun when you stop being able to freely put it down when you want to -- when you've barked your knuckles on the chainring for the 33rd time. And it's also pretty clearly backed up by studies that show that autonomy is a strong factor in workplace happiness and effectiveness.
But I don't buy into that, I believe that you can lose the joy just as much, or more, when you are following the self-employed model.
Working for a boss it's still quite possible (but maybe not easy) to separate work hours from leasure projects in the same fields, but when self-employed, all "off" projects have the potential to become "on" or something in between.
Yeah, there being another person involved isn't the issue, I think, it's that (ultimately) you either do the work or you don't eat. Which is never the case when it's "just a hobby".
So the golden path in keeping a hobby on the fun side is to select one that is sufficiently expensive to never ever be at risk of seeing a break-even line at the horizon.
I had this attitude until my late 20s. Then I realized that I really need a career to set myself up in life. So now I'm a senior programmer.
And my programming hobby? Better than ever! Turns out, having actual professional experience makes things easier and I can just play around with it whenever I want with a lot less stress than if I didn't also do it as a job.
Of course, I also have other hobbies. But making money on my main hobby was great in the long run.
I recall discussing this with some one who had switched to web dev from music - he had a Phd and was a London Session musician who had played on top 10 hits.
At some point it stops being fun - 8 hour days practicing for example he mentioned.
Most professional musicians I've heard from would be thrilled to even spend that much time on music itself, what with all the other annoying business details to manage.
I think that's the story of trying to turn anything hobby-like into a living. You start out as a photographer or an artist, but you end up having to be a general manager and an accountant.
It's the age-old tension between "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life", and "the best way to ruin your hobby is to make it your job."
There is also value in keeping your passion as something you enjoy and brings you happiness in your leisure time, rather than turning it into something that brings you stress and pressure full-time.
I think one can make some money by selling photos to photo stock sites. It's a kind of semi-passive income possible when you shoot landscapes or common objects.
It of course is unlikely to become a primary, or significant, source of income. It also unlikely to affect what you do for fun.
It gets weirder, often they'll insult you because it's not a 'real job'.
I still cannot understand but to many, sitting at a desk idleing is incomparably better than doing something on your own. Be it maths, electronics .. doesnt matter.
In economics there's something called the Wilt Chamberlain Problem, where Chamberlain explained that he liked basketball so much that he'd play for free. Yet he was paid millions. So every dollar that he was paid produced no incentive for further supply, which caused economists to consider this situation more like rent than wages. With the rent of land, no greater supply of land is manifest when the landowner is paid.
I understand but that's an utilitarian view of life. And also how do you value things like that .. again, we're back to the relativistic nature of money.
I think they mean that the Puritan work ethic is that working hard is good, always, and if you're not working hard, you're not being good, so they get on your case about doing something you like or something not traditionally seen as work (i.e. painting, writing novels, etc)
As for their mindless job, they might not see it as so. They could have stress and deadlines for their bullshit work and feel like they're working hard, even though the they are basically doing the same as taking a bucket out into the ocean and scooping up the water and dumping it out into the rest of the ocean.
So they're working hard and they're good, and you're just messing about, and you're bad. Which of course is not a healthy way of looking at things, hence the dark side of the Puritan work ethic.
Does it have to be mutually exclusive? I mean, Can a hobby that we enjoy to have fun not also make money?
Here's the relationship is unidirectional - do something for fun and if it makes money then it's well and good. Why to drop that just because it makes money (which isn't the original motive).
The article highlights how trying to make money can quickly and thoroughly poison your hobby. The golden quote:
> “Hmm…I want to write a book. I would really love to write a sappy romance novel because I think they’re so fun to write. But I need to turn it into profit, so I should do market research and see what’s trending and build off that. Self-help is big, let’s try to focus on that, even though I personally hate self-help books.”
Note the change. "I really want to write a romance novel. I did market research. Self-help sells better. I'll write self-help then."
Following this thinking, you'll end up doing something you hate (and probably produce a barely sellable garbage). Hobby is about a thing ("I want to write a romance novel"). Making money is about money, and the thing is only means to an end ("I'll write whatever sells best, and maybe I should reconsider whether I can do something else than writing for even more money.").
I'd argue that even in professional life, this kind of thinking taken to the extreme is poison, and part of what ruins our societies and the planet. That is, companies which are really indifferent to what they're doing, and only focused on whether they can make money on it.
(One could argue that this is how market economy is supposed to work - don't think for yourself, don't feel for yourself, just do what the Market tells you to. We can see both good and bad consequences of that thinking all around us.)
I agree that taking it to an extreme can be a poison, but neglecting it entirely can be a poison too.
I've said this before on HN, but my recommendation is this: Most people can find a set of things they're willing to do. If you only have one thing you think you can do with your life, first try expanding your wings and sampling a few more things.
Then, write down on one list the things you want to do with life, in some rough order of preference. On another list, write down the marketable things you think you're capable of, in some rough order of lucrativeness.
Odds are, there's going to be something that shows up reasonably positioned on both lists. "Software engineer" was certainly not my #1 on my "list of things I'd like to do", but my personal #1 was frankly absurdly unrealistic and barely shows on the "what I can make money with" list at all. (The modal outcome is quite likely $0/yr, honestly.) But software engineer was a pretty solid #2. On the other side of the list, I probably could have been a lawyer, and may well have made more money at it, but it didn't show very high on my "list of things I'd like to do". Software engineer was somewhere around #2 on both lists, so it won. I have no regrets. It was a fine choice. And it was something I could easily figure out how to angle for, and there was no simply blundering into a career.
If you do want to write something, and you want to make money at it, I recommend a similar approach. Wanting to write a romance novel and deciding to write a self-help book may not bring you joy, but wanting to write a romance novel and instead writing a YA romance novel because that's where the money is may not be such a sacrifice.
I missed that on HN before, so thanks for writing again. I never thought of writing down two lists, even though it's obvious in retrospect. I'll try this exercise.
I did come to the conclusion some time ago that since writing code is my #1 money-making skill and in top #3 of "things I'd love to do" (and a part of #1 too), but the types of programs to write are different, I need to focus on finding overlap in what I write when looking for jobs or (now) customers.
Somebody needs to write self help books for the people who need them. That somebody should do a lot of boring research (note that I said should: the implication that they might not is intentional).
Society would fall apart without people who clean sewers, take the trash, and many other tasks that are unpleasant. Maybe you are lucky enough to get paid well to do what you love. Maybe you are not willing to do some unpleasant job that would pay better than your own. Likely you are unable to do some jobs (lack of training or lack of physical ability). No matter what you do, and no matter what your abilities: there is some other job that you could do instead. The market economy works because it provides motivation for people to not do a job they would love and instead do something else.
> Somebody needs to write self help books for the people who need them. That somebody should do a lot of boring research (note that I said should: the implication that they might not is intentional).
That doesn't mean it should be the author. If he hates self-help books as a concept, he'd probably do a shit job at it. That is, he might make money, but the book wouldn't be useful. Market economy as it is today, in practice, is pretty bad at rewarding quality. Marketing gives much greater ROI.
> The market economy works because it provides motivation for people to not do a job they would love and instead do something else.
I recognize that and this is the main thing I meant under "good" when I wrote about "good and bad" consequences. Unfortunately, Sturgeon's law applies - "90% of everything is crap". The market doesn't seem good at reducing this percentage. In self-help space, we need more Carnegies and Coveys, and less copycats who arrive in the space through "market research" and crap out nonsense that ultimately wastes buyers' money. Same thing applies to all other spaces. My complaint isn't really about the market telling you what to do - I'm just wishing the market was better at directing the right people to the right jobs, ensuring there's "impedance match" between the worker and the work.
I'm not sure how we can get there, though I think it would have to start with completely destroying the marketing industry. The world won't stop drowning in bad products and services for as long as a dollar spent on marketing buys you more profit than a dollar spent on product development or improving your service. Marketing completely scrambles people's ability to evaluate and reward quality and utility.
Because by sharing your work, especially if you charge money, you’ll start feeling the pressure ... to improve, to support your customers, to react to your competition.
This is actually the reason for why many open source developers burn out, even if they aren’t making any money, which is tragic.
And you might say that you’ll not fall for it. Well good luck with that.
In my experience the minute you share your work with others, that’s when it becomes slightly less fun and it’s all downhill from there.
> In my experience the minute you share your work with others, that’s when it becomes slightly less fun and it’s all downhill from there.
Unfortunately, this is often true -- but there are exceptions. I've had a couple of projects where the experience has been almost entirely positive. There's a lot of satisfaction in seeing that something I designed and created purely to suit my needs has turned out to be used and appreciated by others as well.
I have a program I created as a hobby, put on github, then it grew popular enough to need occasional support and updating. Sometimes I wish I did not put it out there.
It can quickly become work instead of fun; work you are not paid for. Though if you accept donations for it, then you have an obligation to keep it going.
> Though if you accept donations for it, then you have an obligation to keep it going.
You most certainly do not. In the same place you ask for donations, make it clear they’re for people to thank you for the work you already put into it, not to “buy” future work time.
If you don’t want to work on a feature, say “no”. If a user acts entitled, explain (tip: keep a non-confrontational text snippet ready) that you’ve developed the software in your free time and are under no obligation to fix other people’s bugs; when you do, it’s because you want to. Lock the thread if need be. Does the user come back to open another issue, guns blazing? Block them.
I spend hours every day on open-source. I’ve learnt that most users are reasonable and can take a “no” if you add a “because”. It does not have to be the soul-wrenching experience many maintainers make it out to be.
Sadly that doesn't work out so well. Just look at the recent npm event-stream debacle for an example.
An author didn't really want to deal with a library any more, someone came out and offered to maintain it, the original creator agreed and moved things over, and the new author added exploits to the code.
Most of HN and other social media was lambasting the original creator for doing something so "careless". Many people wanted them to just shut it down when they were done with it, others wanted them to more carefully vet potential maintainers, still others said that shutting the project down would be irresponsible as there could be vulnerabilities found that need to be fixed.
There really isn't a right answer, and with how social media sites feel these days with witch hunts and outrage flying around everywhere, I personally have shied away from open sourcing a few tools that I've created simply because I don't have the time or care to maintain them. The last thing I want is "social media" to collectively decide that I've made terrible mistakes that no sane programmer would ever make in their code, and that I deserve to never work in this industry again.
I'm part of HN, my general attitude here is that the maintainers of the consuming software are at fault.
If you have so many dependencies (especially in javascript, hah) that you can't keep track of what's happening with them then either your scope is too big or you're just carelessly glueing things together because you can't be bothered to build sane things on your own.
I understand using things like jasmine and one or two other big things, but at that point those big things are critical components of what you've built and you need to be paying close attention to them for the duration that you're responsible for the maintenance of the code.
TL;DR: the fault is with the consumers for being careless, not the people who actually put work in.
But you can't hope to watch every dependency of every dependency of every dependency all the way down, at some point you need to trust that the code will do what it says.
Dependencies don't just end at a package.json. Their dependencies matter, as do theirs. The C++ code use in the javascript engine is a dependency, as is the python code they use during the build process, which itself relies on Python and their interpreter, which is again more C code, which means you need a compiler, which also has a large suite of dependencies and relies on an OS to provide many things, which themselves rely on more compilers and eventually machine code that should be consumed correctly, and that depends on the microcode running in the CPU to be created correctly and without any vulnerabilities. Of course that microcode is generated using more higher-level code, and the cycle continues.
You literally can't check everything, and I'd argue that you can't even check more than 2 steps out from your own code realistically.
That's not to say you shouldn't try, but you can't just pretend that it's the fault of the consuming dev that they got exploited just like you can't pretend that it's the fault of the original creator of the code who doesn't want to maintain it any more.
These things are going to happen, and I think we would all be better off if we just accepted that, stopped trying to place blame on a specific person or group, and instead continue working on making it harder to accomplish those bad things. Otherwise we get into a situation where "the only winning move is not to play".
No you absolutely do need to trust the dependency code unless you're working on a toy application. If you're building something real where reliability and security actually matter then you have to either verify the dependencies yourself, or actually pay vendors to do it for you and get written contracts for support. Unfortunately many developers have fooled themselves into believing they can get something for nothing, and then act surprised when the inevitable consequences hit.
So how many layers of verification do you or the companies you work at pay for? How many layers of dependencies do you pay someone to verify? Do they pay others themselves to verify the layers below them?
What do you do when someone has a dependency on something like OpenSSL, GCC, V8, Chromium, or even Linux? It's easy to say "oh well just pay someone", but who would I pay, and what would I pay them for?
We use npm to install 2 dependencies for a project i'm currently on. I can vet those 2 dependencies, and luckily in this case they are simple and each only depend on another 4 or 5 themselves, and in total I have 20 deps. I can review that, and it all looks good (for the sake of discussion let's assume I can actually carefully review and understand every line, when we both know that's not possible in the real world).
Now what? Well I'd also need to validate that the tool `npm` isn't hacked, and now that's a massive amount of work, then throw on node on top, and then v8 on top of that. So let's throw away all of javascript because I don't have a few hundred million dollars laying around to spend on auditing the entire javascript ecosystem.
So what platforms do you use? C/C++ are out of the question, GCC is massive and I don't think I have the money to pay for audits for that either, let alone libc and OS kernels. So does that rule out everything except for small embedded systems and custom designed chips? Maybe there are some assemblers out there that can compile some simple code and are small enough to be audited by a smaller company. I mean you'd still have supply chain attacks that you need to protect against and verify, but hey those are easy to fix right?
Or do those dependencies not count for some reason?
And that's even assuming that an audit of a codebase will catch much of anything, which we both know they won't in all cases. So then what do you do when one slips through the cracks? Find someone to blame like that'll help anything? Tell the company that got owned that if they just added a few more zeros to the end of the check they wrote someone would have caught this?
This "just verify it" stuff gets so tiring, it's literally not possible.
Maybe I'm really living in a bubble of the wild west of computer programming, but somehow I just can't see this magical world just out of reach where everyone else verifies and vets every single dependency and that chain continues unbroken all the way down to the firmware and even the hardware and nobody ever makes mistakes and nobody ever pushes changes out at any level without hundreds of people reviewing and improving and fixing and re-verifying every single change.
The idea that anything even close to resembling this happens in the real world is so laughable to me, it's just the same old "only REAL programmers do x" gatekeeping that is so prevalent in this industry. And this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me not want to contribute back any changes. Because god forbid I don't spend wheelbarrows of cash on vetting every single part of my stack, and that my code isn't absolutely perfect in every way, or I'll be dragged across the coals and made into some kind of demon for having done something so stupid that a "real programmer" would obviously never do.
This is how you end up with stuff like QNX. It's really not nice to program for but you have a whole company who's job it is to produce a set of more or less verified dependencies.
Also: there are compilers other than gcc that are much smaller.
It's not complicated. You can pay Red Hat or one of their competitors for Linux verification and support (including security patches for included libraries), and in turn they'll pay whichever other vendors are necessary to deliver on that contract. Get it in writing. For accountability you need a "single throat to choke".
If you're using npm for something important then just realize that you're taking a huge risk and don't be surprised when it blows up in your face. Most of the discussions on HN are about toy applications which don't really count for anything. I would be surprised if the Visa payment processing system uses npm.
It can then inadvertently turn into a second job. For some people that won’t be a problem, if they develop a true passion for their hobby then it might be a great outcome!
However, for some people it might sap the original enjoyment they had. Now you’re concerned about profitability and maintaining your audience and market etc. Soon your mindless pastime is causing you stress and anxiety, which defeats the point.
Every time I bring up that I'm building an app on my own time, without fail I'm asked "How are you going to make money off it?"
People never listen when I tell them that I code because I enjoy it. It makes me wonder how much people actually enjoy aspects of their own lives. If I make money off what I do, that's great, but most of my motivation is to satisfy the "what if" and "could I" type questions that run through my brain.
As you grow older your time becomes more valuable.
But I think the author should take a break from reading sites such as HN, IH, etc. Because in this crowd, everybody seems to be obsessed with having a successful side-business making hundreds or even thousands a month.
I take days off from work to work as a mechanic on race cars. I do it for free and enjoy doing it. I have friends who are professional mechanics who think I am crazy for doing their job for free. But it's not all about money, it's about how you enjoy to spend your time.
It all depends on what you value. As an older person, my experience is that those who view life as a mission to accumulate up as much wealth, possessions and skills as possible end up miserable. Life is a journey to be enjoyed each day, not some sort of mission with an achievable end-point. You don't "win" life by accumulating the largest pile of tangible assets. I've found that those who are the happiest work hard enough so that they have enough money to do the things they want to do, with a little extra saved up for contingencies. Its a cliche, but life truly is a journey and not a destination.
Yes. When young, we do not know, nor can we plan with any certitude, what may come. Que sera, sera. We can turn the wheel on the kiddie cars at the carnival, but we can only pretend we're steering. (For most of us.)
But when we are 20 years old, we can be certain we'll only be under 30 for a short time. With all that being under 30 entails ... of unreplaceable value. With good health and some luck, it will never be easier to travel, to meet a broad range of people ... to learn from and share with. To have the surplus energy to enjoy becoming good at something that might become a career (while realizing that advances in technology may make it obsolete!).
Life in a well-worn rut may be the only choice for some ... but those who stay free may find new paths.
Depends on what you mean by older. You have less time because you chose to have less time. Let's ignore 40 hours for work and 56 hours for sleep, the rest is based on choices you made along the way. Could be kids or commitments or location demands or _____, but the scarcity of time does not change with age, it changes with the accumulation of decisions that consume that time.
I wish there was only 40 hours for work. At my current place 45-50 is more common. Add another 10-12 hours of commuting, at least 2-3 hours for personal grooming (and my wife is probably double that), and exercise/stretching which becomes increasingly important as you age. So, yes, there is little time for hobbies after accounting for my kids, my wife, the dog, the housework, etc.
It's more valuable in terms of exploitation vs exploration [1] -- i.e. it's more important to do what you know you like and not just patiently spend time on something you don't
Learning things before the right time can become a hindrance. In my case the first year and a half of Uni couldn't have been more boring, I basically learned nothing new but had to spend a shitload of time doing just homework meant for people to learn the concept not prove they know the concept, and that absolutely killed all my motivation to do Uni.
I started embracing and justifying spending time on hobbies when I realized they give me something to talk about with non-IT people, and that is valuable. If your hobbies are IT work, and your work is IT work, there aren't many aspects of your life to which people outside of that domain can relate, in fact it can all seem quite boring and you end up with, "I'm doing well, work is going well." But if you can mention you went hiking somewhere and took a new lens for your camera, there are several things in there to which most people can relate and then maintain an interesting conversation.
This is a common issue, but most do not recognize it. Fewer do anything about it.
My feeling is that the author's definition of what is needed, and what is normal, is out of whack. The author has apparently made an income that allows for survival, but along the way has become conditioned to only work for profit. When you feel profit is survival, this makes sense. In the United States for example, you are given this message all day, every day.
But once you get past survival needs, and want to turn back to things that give life meaning, you can find you are wired to only evaluate the profit potential.
What helped me in the past when I was in this trap was volunteering for a 2 week "vacation" helping people much worse than me. I like to travel, so I would volunteer for 2 weeks at someplace like La Joya orphanage in Mexico. The founder needs help teaching and building sustainable homes for children that can't even imagine the good life. Give some of yourself to them, and see how fulfilling it can be.
When you get back suddenly just enjoying music, reading poetry, or doing something else for personal satisfaction will seem much more worthwhile.
You don't have to travel far to do this. Any medium sized city in the US will have soup kitchens and organizations that try to help the homeless, volunteer some time and energy and you'll get a radical perspective reset. And make no mistake about it, it's hard. Do it until it feels comfortable.
It will help you in a lot more ways than you think. You might be able to sustain a transactional relationship with a partner, but you won't have a really great one if one or both of you is continuously keeping score; things just get out of balance and there is nothing that can "fix" it if maintaining that balance is a need. It's sort of obvious too when you're objective about it, there is nothing you can ever do which is equivalent to growing a baby in your wife's body for 9 months, no amount of "girl's nights" or whatever will ever equal that out. I have no idea how you can be a good parent if there is some sort of return you're expecting other than a smile and a hug; it's sort of the ultimate in that you just give and give and then give some more.
In the talk, he discusses a few things, but one thing he discusses in the importance in doing things periodically for which we are beginners. If you are getting paid to do something, you're probably not a beginner. One way to practice not making money is take up a hobby in which you are a beginner. I don't mean like: I'm a programmer by day, and I YouTube about programming by night (that's still about programming). Find something completely unrelated to what you're doing.
It must be nice for Kent to just trot off and investigate whether or not his work "matters". For the rest of us, this is a non starter because that effort can't be captured in a story or a task attached to a story on the Jira board. Us mortals might be able to convince our boss that our investigation is worthy of a spike but it'd be bounded to a couple of hours. For us dark matter engineers we need to tell ourselves that, because we're paid, our work "matters".
Putting a YouTube video together is something I'm a beginner at. The content might be programming (Something I'm an expert in), but there is a lot about video production that I do not know. Of course after a short time of doing those YouTube videos I'm no longer a beginner and now I need to find something different.
I feel this too. It's perverse and it makes it feel like nothing is worthwhile unless it scales and earns a profit. I get that it's all in my head, but it's a real undercurrent in the west, particularly in tech. I'm not quite sure how to free myself of it...
All that is weighing heavily on us is due to being attached to false assumptions. There is, after all, no actual social reality by which to judge ourselves. It’s all made up and seemingly supported by a deranged consensus reality. We are free as we are before and beyond any false assumptions. There is no need to be anything special and therefore, there are no serious moves to make.
Yes! There are no serious moves. Nothing in life is really serious, not even death.
But I feel like I need to reach some impossible state of ego integrity or ego death or something to actually live by that line of thinking.
So instead, I'm moved by fear and contrived seriousness. I want to be successful, or at least successful enough that one day I can spend my 80s seriously and nostalgically navel-gazing to bewildered viewers outside of my social reality, convinced that I am extremely special. [0]
I know I often think this way but I think what made it possible for me to pursue "unprofitable" hobbies was the realization that prophet isn't all that great an objective, it's just nice because it's easy to quantify. It doesn't tell you about the relationships you form or the things you learn. If you focus on things like that eventually thinking about prophet will actually make you feel a little sick and you'll pick up totally unprofitable things like learning Egyptian hieroglyphs and ukulele.
I brew mead. There's no way I could make money from it. However I can make enough to get myself and everyone around me blind drunk. Free mead quickly stops a lot of arguments.
My first stab at it was simply following a youtube tutorial on how to make it based on what you can buy at the supermarket (bread yeast, mineral water, honey and some raisins). You mix it all up and leave it to ferment in the water bottle. This turned out rather well.
I then bought a basic 'kit' off amazon, and a couple of books. The recommended reading is 'The Compleat Meadmaker' by Ken Schramm and 'The Complete Guide to Making Mead' by Steve Piatz. Start off with simple meads. Then experiment. :)
Making friends with the local beekeeping association and LARP group is also recommended. :)
There is tons of info on the Internet as you would expect.
This is the bible: http://howtobrew.com/ Its the 1st edition of the most popular book to learn brewing by far. Mead is just a slight offshoot from beer, you just replace some grain with honey. This will teach you the fundamentals, then you can just google "mead recipe" and apply the same techniques.
Yup. The author is conflating "hobby" and "work." He states he wants to eventually go solo and all his side projects end up needing a monetization plan to move him in that direction.
It really sounds like he needs to sit down and think about his 5-year plan. What does he actually need to do to work for himself? What real steps can he take now? Tomorrow? Next year?
This could be his hobby as well, but it doesn't sound like that's what he wants. I would suggest picking up a hobby that isn't in any way related to work. Sports, camping, photography, something that is nearly impossible to monetize without a lifetime of training/effort and good luck on top.
As you say, money for money's sake is mostly worthless. I've found I'm quite happy where I am, with an income to support the things I want to do (plus save for retirement). Every time I think about a side project, I quickly realize I'd rather spend that time riding my bicycle, walking my dog, or just sitting on the deck with my wife looking out at the trees.
> Every time I think about a side project, I quickly realize I'd rather spend that time riding my bicycle, walking my dog, or just sitting on the deck with my wife looking out at the trees.
As do I.
I know some people enjoy working on FOSS, but for me, development is work. If I'm coding, it's for work. I work when I work, I relax when I relax.
Of course I've done a few personal projects, but mostly tooling and automation to let me do other things I enjoy.
This does seem to be a somewhat developer specific problem though. My lawyer friends don't do legal stuff in their free time (a few do pro-bono on occasion). Nor do my nurse friends do medicine when they're not on the clock.
Unless you enjoy what you're doing to earn said money.
Or rephrased: do what you love
I wrote what I considered a great paper (my professor thought it was average) a few years back modeling people's abilities for generating social, financial and familial utility. People who have a preference for something they don't have an equal ability for creating often are often unhappy and dissonant.
Eg a "wannabe celebrity". They crave social utility, but often aren't good at producing it, and so have to sacrifice social and financial gains for social ones. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
>
I wrote what I considered a great paper (my professor thought it was average) a few years back modeling people's abilities for generating social, financial and familial utility. People who have a preference for something they don't have an equal ability for creating often are often unhappy and dissonant.
I thought about it as well - there are certainly people whose interest and temperament don't match their abilities and limitations - for example, someone who sees himself as an adventurer, but gets sick easily and thus is miserable through most of his "adventures". It seems like the wise thing to do is to just accept one's limitations, but the heart wants what the heart wants.
OPs friend Kevin has it right. Make a hobby out of something that you cannot even fathom how to make money out of. Sports is ideal since you will obviously be super bad compared to the worst guy that makes money of it. My old coach is now World Champion in the Duathlon. The money she makes off that would not make my cut for a new dev project.
Duathlon is thus a very safe choice for a hobby uncontaminated by monetary concerns. But for most of us the triathlon or running is safe. The risk of becoming world champion are overstated.
For some the money is just a symptom, not the problem.
I for instance try to "optimize" things. I overdo stuff, and eventually burn out of it. It doesn't matter if I can make money from it, I'll latch on to just about anything and my brain will start working overtime to think of anything and everything to be able to get better at it, until I no longer want anything to do with it.
It's happened with jobs, it's happened with videogames, it's happened with things like building computers or working with microcontrollers.
It's a personality trait of mine, and taking the symptom away (do things that can't make money, do things that don't have any kind of "scoring") doesn't solve the problem, it just changes it. And when I did end up trying to find hobbies that had no way of "scoring", nothing to get better at, nothing to improve on, I found myself pretty depressed.
It was something I needed to work on internally, something I needed to talk with a therapist about and learn to manage. And at this point in my life, I feel I have a much better handle on it. But simply picking hobbies that can't become a source of income didn't change anything for me, it just meant that I got less benefit from overdoing it.
For me it's board game design. It would be nice to make serious money off of it, and it is possible, but most people I know, even with successful games, aren't making enough to quit their day jobs (that pay a lot less than software dev).
Hell, one guy I know had a game you could buy at Barnes and Noble he worked on in his spare time for two years, and the publisher considered to be one of their more successful titles, earn only $10k in royalties (which he split 50/50 with a codesigner), so he only got $5k out of it.
I could take a simple dev job and make that in a week of work.
And it's a very collaborative field, so I get to meet a lot of people in the industry just by going to conventions and offering to playtest their games or help publishers demo their games to potential customers.
For me, as soon as I think of monetizing something I just lose my interest in it straight away.
I don't know why it happens. I love programming, and I just put it all up on GH for free. I've actually got a few 'side-projects' which actively burn money instead of making money.
I do them purely for fun and learning, and every time I think of making money from it, it turns into a job and obligations. Now if people don't like something I build - I feel no obligation to fix it. :)
I've been doing this for about 20 years myself. Everything I do, that I enjoy, I think to myself "I love this. I want to do this all the time. So now I have to make a business of it?"
It was just in the last 3-4 months that I realized - if I love something, keep doing it in such a way that I can enjoy it, but let WORK be WORK, don't let the things I enjoy become my work.
Every "fun" thing I've tried to turn into the business has made me eventually hate that thing.
I created video games. Had financial success. But eventually hated the game-dev world. It turned out that creating interesting new games was only a small part of that business. Marketing, bug fixing, customer service, taxes, etc, became my life. Then having my hard work get pirated, stolen, and even re-sold by scammers without my permission ended up ruining that business and I couldn't keep it financially afloat.
Same thing happened with my escape room business. The escape room business turned into a customer service, marketing, taxes, insurance, safety, and human resources business. Dealing with employees for part time, kind-of on-call, customer service work was nearly impossible. Finding them, training them, firing them, trying to keep them hired, dealing with their problems, dealing with them calling in sick. It took all my time. I ended up trying to do it all myself and that didn't work at all. Then the costs involved crushed me because I didn't realize how expensive it would be.
I also love board games. I tried turning that into a business, but have stopped short as I realize it will become the same damn thing.
Anyway, I am just going to play escape rooms, video games, and board games now. I'm going to enjoy them. If I create something, it won't have to be for profit, but for family and friends to try. We'll enjoy a Saturday afternoon, I'll have an outlet for my creativity, then Monday I'll get back to my web dev job and make money. I'm not going to love sitting here coding, but that's my job, and if I focus on this job, I'll make good money - enough money to be able to thoroughly enjoy gaming, and even create some fun personal stuff along the way.
I was going to make a joke about children being ideal chimney sweeps, but I thought I probably shouldn't. I'd appreciate it if you pretended I did, and it was really funny and witty, and made you do a sensible chuckle, and it was tastefully done, so you weren't offended in any way.
There are plenty of places today where children are still your social safety net, especially as you go into retirement. We just happen to live in incredibly well-off countries where this need and motivation has largely disappeared (which shows to some degree in our reproductive rates). There's nothing wrong with it - practical reality trumps blind ideals every time.
Even in rich countries, properly equipped children can provide resources that are worth millions if not more. You can't buy the loyalty that a child would have, and a tribe of highly educated, resourceful children is quite a force to have in your old age.
In my experience, the families that had 3 to 5 children, where at least 2 or 3 of them supported each other went far further than others. They save money by being each other's insurance, are able to share resources and knowledge, help each other in rearing their own set of children, and the implicit trust is something that can't be bought.
Of course, it can all go sideways too, but that's applicable in any situation. But the upside is huge.
>I was going to make a joke about children being ideal chimney sweeps,
Their small hands are great for working on modern cars (especially the electrical connectors with tabs that are hard for sausage fingers to manipulate).
When you're carrying something heavy they can make every door open automatically.
They also make great confined space welders.
All the energy they have makes them great for manual labor too. The manual labor has the side benefit of making them less picky eaters and better at sleeping.
Kids are great for helping with all sorts of around the house projects too. Having a helper is an invaluable force multiplier.
Edit: Why is this opinion not acceptable here? Are kids supposed to stare at a screen for every waking hour not consumed with school work?
Thank you for the chuckle! As a kid who grew up "helping" (often just learning, but occasionally actually contributing), I find your list pretty reasonable! I didn't, unfortunately, learn to weld until my early 30s.
Wrong in what way? I would wholly agree. I have two kids and it's the most fulfilling endeavour in my life by far. In my 20s I had a drive to become some expert well-known programmer. That all suddenly felt silly when my first was born.
I think one of the greatest boons of parenthood, for me at least, is the complete and total conviction and faith that I'm doing something meaningful with my life. Before kids, I always had doubts that I was using my time here well. Before kids, I really didn't know what unwaivering faith felt like. It's really quite reassuring. It allows me to enjoy my career because my career is no longer the focus and the thing that I must get right. Life is fleeting.
> That all suddenly felt silly when my first was born. (...) I think one of the greatest boons of parenthood, for me at least, is the complete and total conviction and faith that I'm doing something meaningful with my life.
As a soon-to-be parent, I really worry that I start thinking like this. I mean, there must be something more to life than just growing to adulthood and having children, who'll then grow to adulthood and have children, ad infinitum.
Why? I'm not claiming there isn't, or that there is, but it does seem plausible to me that we're just part of a recursive function in the universe that came about due to chance and will last as long as the boundary conditions allow us to.
Perhaps what makes people think they are special or that there "must" be a greater reason for their existence is the portion of their brain which is programmed (by chance) to tell them so, in order to facilitate the aforementioned recursion by securing resources, attracting a mate, and furthering the recursion. Some call it ego.
> Why? I'm not claiming there isn't, or that there is, but it does seem plausible to me that we're just part of a recursive function in the universe that came about due to chance and will last as long as the boundary conditions allow us to.
I didn't mean it in religious sense, that there is a deeper meaning that's prescribed to us. Right now I do believe we're this "part of the recursive function", but we're also that part that recognizes concepts like "meaningful" and can strive to achieve it.
I meant that merely continuing the "grow, reproduce, die" cycle like every other living organism on the planet feels deeply unsatisfying to me. What I find satisfying is learning things, building things, and contributing to the society and the world in a way that makes other people - now and in the future - ever so slightly happier and less in pain.
Everyone struggles with the "deeper meaning" of life. We all want to feel like we're contributing on a global scale, but I think it's helpful to readjust the way you approach things.
Nothing happens on a global scale without starting on an individual scale. We're surrounded by fiction that posits an apocalyptic end of the world, by an number of methods.
Take a few minutes to meditate on what that would really mean to you. If huge global events happen, but don't touch you personally, would it cause a huge disruption to you? How about small local events? I think you'll find they would be much more likely to affect you and much more devastating.
I like to think, "The world doesn't have to end, for your world to end." It helps me grasp the importance of the day to day things I do, and appreciate them.
Enjoy the life you have, help the people around you, and do what you can to make the world just a little bit better. Maybe you'll get lucky and make the world a whole lot better, but making things a bit better is good enough.
As a parent myself, I think you'll get out of it what you bring to it. If you see computers and programming as just a job, or if your desire is to be regarded by others as famous and respected in the field, having children will make all that seem shallow and pointless. And this is good: your children will have brought perspective. But if you turn to computing the way an iron filing turns to a magnet, if you take fathomless delight in contemplation, then having children will focus and purify that force. You'll learn to keep a problem turning round in the back of your head. You'll bring it out in the dark, in the dead of night when you're rocking a baby to sleep. You'll bring it out when you're folding laundry (so much laundry). You'll bring it out when you're driving the family somewhere, and the car is silent because you're hoping the children will nap. You'll compute without computers.
So eloquent. Yes! This weekend I designed a ROS library during all those moments. Then Monday morning I wrote it all down once at my work computer. There's something so satisfying about learning how to design all in my head.
> I mean, there must be something more to life than just growing to adulthood and having children, who'll then grow to adulthood and have children, ad infinitum.
Of course. Don't worry. You can do meaningful things and become a good parent.
As a kid, I thought the point of life was to make the world a better place. To create a future Jetsons-like society -- where everyone enjoyed an easy life, zooming around in flying cars, with no pain or poverty.
I truly thought it was possible. How naïve was that?
I guess I'm still a kid then. I refuse to believe this is not possible. Even if it wont happen in our lifetimes, it's up to us to get next generations closer to it.
The "many kids" part of it isn't by choice; in some countries it's because it's expected that not all will live to reach adulthood. Fortunately infant mortality rates have been falling worldwide for years, as have fertility rates in some of the world's most populous countries.
Because there are people and places today and plenty of historical contexts where children were and are investments into the parents' futures. Think of places where universal healthcare or pensions don't exist.
There is both a boring-common-unobserved case where children are expected to contribute to the household, and the less common but higher profile case where parents have written off their own chances of "making it big" and begin managing their children full time, most visibly in sports or acting/music.
>... parents have written off their own chances of "making it big" and begin managing their children full time, most visibly in sports or acting/music.
I think you just described nicely the psychology of child beauty pageants.
Wrong because others have monetized their own children. I am thinking specifically of parents who have children in the entertainment or sports industries.
I actually agree with you. My kids are awesome and I enjoy the time playing with them and watching them develop. But not everyone receives that same kind of joy from child development nor do people have the same goals.
Don't extrapolate your unique and personal reactions to and experiences with parenting to the whole population. Raising children is one of the most unique personal things a person to experience, assuming your reaction to it is in any way the 'norm' seems extremely presumptuous.
He does not do it, as far as I understand his post correctly. Funnily, I quite often find reactions such as yours coming from people who oppose the idea of having children.
A parent telling you how happy they are having the kids IS NOT telling you that you should do the same. They're just enjoying it and exposing it as a maybe these days forgotten way of realization as a human being.
As other people in this thread have already pointed out, lots of people have children either primarily or at least partially as a way to attempt to financially secure their future. The OP makes it sound like they're doing it wrong.
PS. I am in no way opposed to the idea of having children.
Children are extremely taxing on time. If both parents work, even more so. It's harder to go out (so now you have to cook most nights) the amount of laundry you have to do doubles or quadrouples. Then there's trying to teach your kids the skills they need to be competitive in a globalized society. Combined with a full time job, you have zero time left over for things you WANT to do, and more than likely you're leaving some things you HAVE to do on the table too.
To me, side projects are probably a rent seeking activity. If I can find 20 minutes here, and there, and turn it into something that generates cash... maybe... just maybe... I can use that to buy some time.. the thing I cherish the most.
Well, indeed raising my children reminds me every day about the fact that I care too much about money. I see them grow up, while I have to do "business" all the time. I really think about moving to a rather remote place where houses are cheaper (yet have good internet access) and then less concentrate on making money, but spending time with the kids, especially on weekends and evenings.
You're not wrong, but it's this kind of thinking that the author is referring to. When it comes to children, if the motivation to develop and cultivate comes from seeing them as a long-term retirement plan that can be dangerous if they fail to meet that expectation.
I've noticed a similar trend for myself but a bit broader. It's more that anything I do, I have to somehow see as an achievement or purposeful. I've been considering new hobbies as of late, but my mental model dismisses them quickly if I can't answer "what would this accomplish?" Unless it's a baseline activity requiring no mental energy (think food, drink, tv, socializing) it's hard for me to consider it without the previous question answered. Example, for the longest time I never read any fiction as I couldn't see the point. Reading some HN comments over the years and hearing reasons like "you read fiction in order to tell better stories", led me to see the "value/accomplishment" in reading fiction. So now, I read a little fiction in addition to all my self-development books, not because I enjoy it but because it's supposedly good for me. I then wonder why all my "hobbies" seem to be draining and not rejuvenating.
One of my hobbies is fixing broken phones / tablets. Many times people have told me I could make decent money if I charged more for my services. That’s probably true, but I don’t want to. I ask cost of parts + $5-10 to afford new tools. That plus the fact it’s fun and I’m helping out a friend is plenty. I don’t want the headaches of turning it into a business.
I write software, both professionally and as a "side gig". I spend a decent amount of time behind my house doing yard work and general maintenance. I don't really look forward to those (non-IT?) activities, but when I am doing them I have realized how nice it is to be doing something other than staring at a screen and be able to look back at a physical object (new plant, fixed deck railing, etc) and say "I did that". It's an unintentional hobby, but it does serve the purpose of taking a break from the keyboard.
What I found missing in my life was the routine part of money management. I now wish I had studied money management first, then found my first "job."
I now have a life plan that I oversee that takes extra income (earned, investment, gift, etc.) and saves it up until it reaches another lump sum amount to continue acquiring cash-flowing assets (I settled on real estate, specifically multi-family rentals).
As my semi-passive income increases, it supplants the required earned income to keep the whole system going.
And for me that means more time researching things "because I'd like to know how they work."
Sometimes I research something and test/play around with it, until I suddenly realize (I am not always that quick, so my sudden takes awhile) that some of my solutions are valuable to others - Then I consider how to spin out that specific service or product to others for their benefit, and the financial (or other - I have been paid in fresh eggs, animal products, vegetables, tools, etc.) reward covers the costs and any extra financial reward adds to the aforementioned savings goals.
Rinse and repeat.
It lets my mind wander onto new topics that I find interesting first, the possible remuneration comes second, if at all.
And until I am completely independently wealthy, I keep a service business going that provides the safety net of making sure all my expenses are paid for.
This also frees up my time to work with experts (attorneys, CPAs) to figure out how to treat the US tax code (I am a US citizen) like a game - If I do something (I want to do it anyway) in THIS fashion, I get an incentive/break from my government...
This has removed the "I have to make a profit!" stress I was feeling previously.
And if this works for me, it seems like it would probably work for others...
I have a friend who is a skilled woodworker. I asked if she ever thought about selling her work, and she replied, "Then it would be a job." Wise words...
On the other hand, my wife was volunteering, and the organization offered to pay her for a day or so a week. It let her be more involved in the functioning of the organization, so the (nominal) pay let her contribute more effectively. They'd like her to move toward full-time, but as with my friend, "Then it would be a job."
Unless money is needed for bare survival, it's almost always a proxy / an abstraction for social/peer recognition.
There are fields where you can get plenty of social recognition directly without making money. For example arts and performances or anything where you express yourself in a way that is accessible to others (for me personally it's making and playing music).
Software / Hardware unfortunately isn't one of these fields because chances are that either your new project is so niche that only very few people get it or because the people who do get it are not the types you are seeking recognition from.
So there's nothing wrong with looking for monetization strategies for new side projects. It's just a way to know if others appreciate what you've built, especially in fields where social recognition outside of monetization is a difficult affair.
The post sums up why so much of the "early Internet" seems to have disappeared, and why the content on so many websites feels like it's designed for lead gen only.
>"I should do market research and see what’s trending and build off that. Self-help is big, let’s try to focus on that, even though I personally hate self-help books."
This type of keyword and topic research is why the front page of your search results are nearly always some throwaway blog post from some company trying to sell you something. These results just barely resemble what you're looking for, among a sea of similar "close enough" results.
For me, I'm not necessarily thinking about monetization, but about finding an audience. I would like for as many people to enjoy my work as possible. But finding an audience basically requires you to have a successful product (unless you're doing it for free), so the mindset it nearly the same, I'm thinking of how I can get as many people as possible to check out my art, which means I might sand off some edges here or there, or think about marketing or whatever, and then I'm not just doing the thing and enjoying it anyway, much like the person who's trying to sell it.
I used to just make stuff and throw it out there in the earlier days of the internet, and it somehow found a decent audience. It seems like it's actually harder to do that now, though, as so many more people are doing the same thing, so it's much harder to stick out from the pack. Also, less and less people check personal websites or blogs, and pretty much only look at instagrams and twitters and facebooks, so if you're not spending serious time on putting yourself out there on social media, you're just not going to get that visibility you're wanting. Which kinda sucks, because I'm kinda bad at the social media part, and doing that feels a lot like a job.
I am indeed a horse owner myself, though my partner does not suffer from its financial effects. It's even the opposite since we leave only once a year, so much saving !
Could be boats. There are a lot of jokes about that too. But there are a lot of hobbies that can just suck in crazy amounts of money. MTG cards, Warhammer figurines, model train sets, boats, consoles and games, anime/movies/series/manga (I have a friend who has entire walls filled with this stuff). Anything were you end up collecting stuff, especially things which has gained value over time because of rarity and interest from collectors.
"A boat is a hole in the water into which one throws money."
Sadly, it's true. Worth it to me -- for the sublime life experiences I think my family and I wouldn't have had any other way -- but it makes no fiscal sense.
My father has a sailing boat which needs maintenance like a house and a car, since you can live on it and it has motors, except you're fighting against corrosion and water all the time. He does a fair share himself but crucial stuff (hull, sealings, ...) is safer when done by pros. And equipment is outrageously expensive : Sails ? 10k. Desalination machine ? 15k and so on...
If you're DIYing boats are cheaper than cars. You'll never be tempted to buy chromo axle shafts and coilovers for your boat and a hull is a hull you either work with it or get a different one. The expenses of setting yourself up to DIY everything are also much less since you won't be temped to build out a fairly well equipped fabrication shop. One of my best friends does boats. He spends way less money on it than me.
> Anything were you end up collecting stuff, especially things which has gained value over time because of rarity and interest from collectors.
At this point questions might start coming back. Just hope your hobby won't be destroyed by speculators who don't care about it, but see an opportunity to see it like a different stock market.
People just don't seem to grasp the concept at all: a lot ask why we run the mesh network and how we finance it - if you explain them it's run for free and there is no profit motive they think you are crazy. It's also surprisingly popular to assume for free = useless - some declined running a node due to this.
On the other hand working for free in uni context is basically self-slaverly - lot's of work, lot's of stuff breaks constantly if you run your typical FOSS stuff and nobody is seeing the work and most don't care or at worst you are blamed and new people advocating their favorite commercial cloud services.
It's still fun and I can learn a lot, run some infrastructure for free where I can test stuff but you really need to be careful to not foul yourself and depending on the org you are in to not just work for free.
The saddest thing about the university thing is: If you advocate to pay that position a lot of - I'm just blunt here: "rich kids" advocate against it because you are at uni anyway and they tell you it's an honour to do this... however if they don't get refund for partly insane travel costs for their university pet project hell breaks loose...