It's unfortunate that the article downplays resilience so much. It's entirely true that you can control your level of stress by making different choices, but for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it. The best way to learn is guided practice under stressful conditions, speaking from personal experience.
Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.
Stress is neccessary to grow and even to keep going, I'm with you in that. But I think the article is right in pointing out that there's too much focus into some inner force that makes you accomplish everything.
This has been going for a while, and coupled with other factors, I don't think it's paying good dividends. I think that everyone paying attention can see the steep increase in depression and medication. It's not only the US, it's happening in Europe too.
My impression is that we're removing people from their support networks, manufacturing lonely individuals, and eroding their financial float line through housing.
I don't think mental thoughness or resilience can overcome this for too long, and many people is exposed to this stressors for many, many years, if not their entire life.
Even Taleb, who is really tiresome talking about stress, recognizes that stress is only useful if it is more or less bounded.
I think the increase in depression is due more towards the increasing isolation in our (American) society, and not so much stress. I moved to a new city a few years ago, and between living alone, working remotely, the pandemic causing many things like tech meetups online, and people in the groups I have been involved with not appearing to reciprocate my interest in getting to know them, I've had a lot of times where life has felt pretty meaningless. This is despite a fair amount of internal energy, interest in learning things, etc. (personal growth / fulfillment). My conclusion is that relationships are a fundamental human need.
But we have designed ourselves into isolation. Half of marriages (built-in community) end, most people no longer go to church, there are not really civic organizations any more, etc. I can spend an entire, active Saturday without interacting with anyone: drive to the park in the morning and walk in the woods, go to the art museum (electronic tickets, so not even interaction purchasing a ticket), check books out from the library (self-checkout), buy groceries to cook dinner (self-checkout is usually faster), watch a movie on my home theater setup. That's even without mobile phones, or the numbing false sense of community of social networks.
So not only do we not have the normal human difficulty in actually caring about and loving another person, but we do not even have the social structure to find people to care about. As a result it's easy to live a life where you experience little of enjoying others and being enjoyed by others.
Yes that is the tendency, but it's still possible to fight it to some extent. Unless you're in a pretty rural area there should be local meetups you can attend. They might not be about exactly the subjects you're interested in, or be attended entirely by people you like, but if you give a couple a chance and keep showing up they might surprise you and you might get some friends out of it.
I still periodically hang out with about a dozen people I met via meetups like 9 years ago. Used to be a lot more, and some moved or drifted off (on both sides, I'm guilty of it as well), but that's still a decent number.
That's not including the group of game designers I befriended by hosting playtest nights, or the local writing group I still do things with every November for Nanowrimo, or a handful of people I met from a couple new meetups I started going to recently.
I've attended funerals, friendsgivings, baby showers, and the like for a few of them too, so we're not just casual friends (although a love of board games and geeky things does tie a lot of us together).
I can't imagine that many people in the rich countries in the modern era are among the most stressed humans in history, even despite the erosion of social support networks. Nearly everyone has adequate shelter, food, security, and access to virtually magical health care from the perspective of everyone before 70 years ago. Children consistently make it into adulthood and famine has been kept at bay for a century or more, interpersonal violence is at an all time low. If in the midst of this unparalleled prosperity and wonder we're just as stressed as a peasant farmer who just lost half their family to disease, war and famine then something is badly wrong with how we handle stress.
Here's another perspective... it isn't just about how we handle stress, it's about the causes of stress...
In her 90s, my grandmother said to me "Your generation has far more money than we had, but we were happier and had less stress." She grew up in a just slightly more than a subsistence level farm family, then with my grandfather achieved just enough farming success to send the next generation to college. She travelled away from home just a few times in life, but as she said - it was a generally low-stress life.
Modern life on the other hand often starts the day with an utterly toxic commute. When we eat, it's often while working at our desk. Our housing costs are far above what was historically considered a safe % of income. We take almost no vacation and when we do, we take our laptop and phone with us. Even if we have health insurance, it is often very challenging to actually get preventative care.
I could go on and on, but my point is - modern life is stressful in completely different ways than the stressed encountered by the historical "peasant farmer." His stress involved things he might be able to do something about, like storing up grain for winter or reinforcing his dwelling. Our modern stress is far more obtuse and difficult to control, like the Fed raising rates or Congress introducing a rider on a bill that wipes out a tax credit that was the only thing keeping us profitable.
Stress is subjective. It doesn't have to align with objective measures. Evolution has selected for stress to work to favor survival in a certain environment, but we're no longer in that environment. If we needed support networks in the past, then we should expect to be unhappy without them, regardless of how important they are to survival in the present.
I don't think it's necessarily just true that there is something wrong with how we handle stress. We also subject ourselves to different types of stress.
A peasant farmer was dramatically more likely to experience violence in a given year. But (from studies I've seen) they probably spent fewer hours in a week working and more with family and friends than a modern-day office worker.
It seems quite possible that the chronic, low-level stress of much modern life
- requires different methods of prevention and healing
- does more damage over the long term if untreated
> If in the midst of this unparalleled prosperity and wonder we're just as stressed as a peasant farmer who just lost half their family to disease, war and famine then something is badly wrong with how we handle stress.
I wonder why your phrasing feels like blame-the-victim?
The people I know under stress in modern society often lack clear options for alternatives or need a completely radical change in their situation.
Or alternatively perhaps we don't actually have prosperity?
Framing things in terms of a victim blaming mindset is a frame that leads to preventable stress because it takes the locus of control away from someone which is a major cause of stress. Focusing on things you can control, like your attitude and perspective, and learning ways to maximize the impact of those things is much, much better for people. I've had a set of life circumstances that are pretty bad objectively over the last couple years and I've been less stressed than nearly any other point in my life because I've been really focusing on gratitude and resilience. I really hope that others can see the same sort of improvements with a similar sort of mindset shift.
I'm guessing your original comment meant to imply that we all have agency to deal with stress: sorry if I misread that.
I also tend to find the idea that we can "control our attitude and perspective" is sometimes used to blame others or self-guilt ourselves for outcomes that are truly outside ones own rational control. The extreme example of this is the belief in manifestation: we can pay for courses to learn how to remove "blocks" so somehow the cancer is ones own fault for not thinking right.
I agree with you that we need to take responsibility for what we can change. I believe we can learn new mindsets or Jiu-Jitsu our minds into grooves that work better. I also think that doing that is extremely difficult and that also that there is much that remains beyond our control (internally or externally). Also the territory of self-help has many traps and deceptions - a hard road to find.
Stress seems best for the primordial hunt and battles of my ancestors who needed a powerful drive to see through an ideally short term situation with more response than they might have otherwise been able to muster, I have always found it living hand in hand with adrenaline.
Stoicism seems to also provide plenty examples of people finding stress and emotion to be first reactions muddying the waters of perception necessary for loftier goals and work than simple hunter gatherers.
Stress long term is unusual for the body and a major disadvantage imo.
And stoicism seeing some quantifiable research into aiding in depression leads me to believe the individual in the current cultural hegemony of western culture is simply a victim, a child never truly raised.
"Work, play - at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen." - Brave New World
An example of this is that obese people don't legendarily have the strongest joints in the world, since they are constantly adding additional strain on every single joint all the time. In fact being significantly overweight does the opposite!
Both cost time, which is finite and precious. Stress reduces the amount of time you have available - if all of your time not working is spent destressing, you're not much fun to be around, and that impact your ability to make and retain friends
This is why most friends are made in high school and college.
The difference is very stark. I probably made 1-2 good friends in the _10 years_ after college, compared to 30+ friends in the 10 years prior to that. Luckily, I managed to keep most friends from before starting work.
Full time work is an absolute black hole of time and relationships.
People who don't have good networks _before_ they start full time work are absolutely boned and I don't think there's an easy solution.
As social animals who will eventually face the loss of every friend we've ever made, cultivating both a good network of friends and a kind of internal resilience is probably the best way one could choose to invest their time.
There are many very questionable ways to invest this finite/precious time, and most of us don't think twice about how much of it we squander (e.g. spending time online). There is a small category of things to focus on that is almost universally worth the effort: sleep, diet, exercise, social connection. Focusing on these things also tends to help establish that inner strength.
Find a hobby that you de-stress with others with so even though you're not fun at the beginning of the class/session, by the end of it you've screamed your frustration out and are pleasant to be around. Make friends at the end of this de-stressing event.
The article does not downplay resilience. It merely says that resilience has both internal and external components. That is, you can only get so far while just focusing on your personal ability to overcome adversity, but you'll do even better if you combine that with external support.
To be honest, I'm not sure how that can be misconstrued on Hacker News, when people frequently focus on the power of groups working together (whether that's open source, corporations, or other organizations). It's clear that some of the most lauded organizations are ones that often support their members, especially in times of hardship.
This comes from someone who is very much a proponent of perseverance. My first tattoo enshrines this Japanese proverb on my forearm where I can always see it:
The proverb is associated with a figure called Daruma, with a round physique that always gets up no matter how it's knocked down. It's cute and symbolic, popular in Japanese culture.
Resilience is important, grit is important. I say this having been on a very dark path when I was holding my personal world up with very little support (so little we can round down).
With that said, friends and resources are important and necessary. It is important to have someone you can call or text and say "I need help" and the cavalry is coming. Be that person to people in your life if you can be. I'm not able to fix society, but I'll take care of the people around me until death.
There's probably a lot more Christians talking about Calvary than there are military historians talking about an obsolete horse unit. Although it does seem like if it's uncapitalized it's likely to be military horses and not geographical locations. I bet trying to optimize autocorrect is a fun challenge!
In italian "La vita è un calvario", in french "La vie est une calvaire" and in spanish "La vida es un calvario" they all mean "Life is an ordeal" or "Life is a torture". May be the context of the topic plays a role here much more that the geography location.
> but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.
It's one thing that we get the occasional natural disaster, financial crisis, or some war in some remote country. We can handle that, this has been the case throughout human history.
But we just came out of a four-year pandemic (and hell, if you look at sewage monitoring, hospitals or half your colleagues being out sick, it still isn't over), after decades of wage stagnation, multiple crises, seriously escalating wars, exploding rents, masses of people living on the streets in the US, climate change is looming, autocrats are on the rise across the world - it's fucking enough already. Politicians aren't doing a thing to help us, no one is looking out for anybody else any more because no one has the mental/physical/time/financial resources to do so.
We are in unprecedentedly bad times, and I can completely understand anybody saying "screw this, I'm out" and just going mental in one way or another. Some resort to drugs, some just break down completely, some off themselves, some off others - everyone reacts different in response to too much stress.
Resiliience is good, but it barely pays the bills.
People don't get rich with resilience, but by charisma, family support, genetic lottery, connections, friends, and opportunities.
Resilience and ingenuity are cool too, but there are tons of resilient and ingenius people that never make it. And there are extremely resilient single mothers working 2 jobs and making ends meet without complaining. But that doesn't get them any success.
> for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it
And in that toolbox should be venting to a friend or taking a break for the evening or weekend and splurging on a nice dinner or small holiday. That’s the article’s point: it’s insufficient to insist on managing it all internally.
It's significantly easier to handle stressors when the stakes are lowered by friends and money. For example, it is so much less stressful to handle legal disputes (everything from traffic tickets to rough divorces to criminal cases) if you don't have to worry about how much your lawyer costs or who will cover your shifts at work etc.
It is much less stressful to handle a cancer diagnosis when you can afford private medicine. And not to mention how super, duper, uber less stressful having an illness like diabetes is if you can afford insulin. Imagine how much more resilience a rape victim could have if they could afford therapy.
When I was younger, there were those who were commonly late or no shows, and their futures rarely went in a good direction. For myself I found I had to acquire quite a bit of resilience to reach average reliability. The youngest generations now see things like a non-fixed schedule as a lifestyle perk—and they're right—but I worry about how they can acquire resilience from this and other areas.
I don't see how it's downplaying anything, except in comparison to money and friends. Given that it's fairly obvious that almost all problems can be solved or seriously mitigated by money and friends, I think it's a fair conclusion to say that money and friends are strictly superior to (internal) resilience. I also think the example and conclusion they gave was perfect: little problems are much bigger when you don't have the tools available to effectively solve them, and those tools are money and friends, which are sources of external resilience. They're not saying internal resilience is bad; they're simply saying that not having to get to the point of needing to be internally resilient is strictly better.
These all seem like fair statements that sound like they come from the department of "no shit, Sherlock," to me.
I interviewed for a dream position at a huge tech co a few years ago . I cold applied after seeing the job ad in the "who is hiring" on HN. That alone felt like a big step, I had never done one of those grueling long interviews people talk about, and someone reached back out. I studied, I practiced coding fast, I did mock interviews, but I was still nervous as hell to actually try one with real stakes.
I thought my resume was a perfect fit, an intersection of fairly niche technologies and skills that I actually had. I had to do multiple screening rounds, solve leetcode-esque problems.
I made it to the onsite! My nerves were going crazy but, the first coding problem, I went right to work, my fingers were flying, and by the end of it I could see that my interviewer was more than pleased. He said I finished early and we could just chat about life at BigCo.
The second round was similar, and the third round! Fourth round, not as great, but I didn't completely whiff on the question. And..........I got rejected.
I was in the dumps for months. Maybe I wasn't cut out for big tech. I'm not smart enough. I don't have impressive credentials. But eventually I said fuck it, I'm going again. I applied to a few more jobs and.....started getting offers at top tier companies.
The algorithmic thinking is hard, coding fast is hard, not letting my nerves get the best of me is hard, explaining my thought process took practice, but just having the resilience to go through the process after hard rejection was crucial.
I had a job at the time, and part of me really wanted to just give up and say I was content with my gig at a small company. But I didn't give up.
I hope I can pass on that trait to my son one day.
The world needs more examples of perseverance leading to success. I think a lot of people think success should come without perseverance. Maybe it works that way for some people but it sure doesn't for me.
I remember a conversation I had with my doctor once. She was talking about her son, and mused that she thought my disability had made me a much grittier and conscientious person than most of my peers.
That's a nice sentiment, but something I noticed when I eventually managed to graduate college was that there was no substitute for a good safety net and parental support.
I watched dumbfounded as some of my classmates went on to found or join risky startups during the great recession. For me, failure would have been catastrophic. I'd have likely wound up sleeping under a bridge. I was amazed they were so fearless! Only, I later learned the reason they were so fearless is they knew their parents would step in and pay for their living expenses while they got back on their feet.
TLDR: Some folks can swing for the fences, take outsized risks, and reap the rewards, because failure is always an option.
It's been observed that the homeless work harder just to get through an average day in more-or-less one piece than almost anyone with a job does (and hell, quite a few homeless do have jobs, in addition to the rest of what they deal with every day)
no substitute for a good safety net and parental support
you don't need parental support if you live in a country that actually has a decent social safety net.
my parents were/are poor. once i moved out i never needed any money from them. however when i was a child we had to live from social services. and that was enough for us to have what we needed.
that safety net gave me the same feeling of security that your friends got from their family. i was able to travel the world from money i earned myself. i took jobs and contracts wherever i wanted, because i knew, if all else fails i can go back to my home country. (edited to clarify)
and even though many people complain how social support is not enough to live on, i have learned to live frugally, and i know that it would be enough for me.
i know that, no matter how bad things could get, i'll never have to sleep under a bridge.
as a society, that should be a minimum standard to aim for. seeing how cities in the US deal with homelessness leaves me dumbfounded. how can a society allow that to happen? it absolutely makes no sense to me. you really need to fix that.
If that was true, then shouldn't Norway, Denmark and France be where all the exciting moonshot startups are founded? Instead, it's the US and China where essentially all innovation and major risk-taking is happening.
Empirically, there must be some other critical variables your hypothesis is leaving out to explain what we see in reality.
good point, and yes, there are other variables. a big one is risk tolerance.
america was built by immigrants who all took a great risk getting there (with apologies to the native americans who were there first), so given equal conditions, a lot more people in america are willing to experiment.
as one consequence americans also have more rolemodels of successful risk-takers.
pretty much elsewhere in the world (at least western and asian countries that i have been to) taking a risk is considered something bad. the hackerspace in singapure has a sign that says: "this is singapures only kiasu free zone". kiasu means "extreme fear of losing", something prevalent in asian culture. european culture is better in that regard, but not much.
so yeah, despite the benefits, most people in europe are afraid to try.
also, as i mentioned, at least in germany people are complaining that the support is not enough.
they didn't have the experience to see the system working like i did. i am willing to take a risk because i have already experienced what will happen when i fail. most people don't have that advantage.
also, because of the lower risk tolerance it is much harder for startups in europe to get money. there are few investors and banks will only give you a credit if you have a proven business model.
most rich people in europe are rich because their families had been rich for centuries. it's almost all old money.
I understand where you're coming from, but there's a fine distinction. Most never wind up testing their safety net. In my mind, the real benefit is the risk tolerance you develop knowing you have one as a young adult.
When you don't that drive for safety can leave one with a very risk adverse mindset. So yeah, you can be FI at 40, but that won't magically change the temperament that got you there.
Except you're not 20. You don't have the same vitality as someone half your age, and you have relationships befitting a 40 year old and not a 20 year old so you still can't take the same risks. You're better capitalized and have deeper relationships than a 20 year old but you're not 20 years old able to. live off ramen and going out for a night of binge drinking with a fellow 20 year old who's going to go on to write Napster or Facebook. You won't wake up at 7 am after that night to roll into class at 9am where you'll network and build relationships where you can both drop out of college to start a new computer company. Where do you find fellow 40 year olds that can also take risks like you're both 20? I'm asking seriously because I'm also 40 and able to take a risk thanks to saving up some money, but imagining that I'm in the same boat as if I had this kind of backing when I was 20 is, I'm sorry, delusional.
but many successful startups are by people in their 40s. i don't think you need to act like a 20 year old in order to start a business. on the contrary. you can start without taking huge risks.
i am obviously not in the same boat as when i was 20. at 20 i knew nothing, i had dumb ideas, and i would have worked my ass off building something that noone needs. now i have experience, and i know that i am not going to waste one minute on coding until i have found customers that will pay for it.
i am building a new consultancy right now. i just need a partner to help me with sales. once we get projects i can start hiring and together we can grow the business.
it's low risk because looking for projects is more or less like looking for jobs. anyone interested?
At 20 you knew nothing and that was a strength. You didn't know any better and went against giants to start Microsoft, Apple, and Google instead of joining HP or IBM. At 40 we could start McDonalds, LinkedIn or Walmart.
Hi nice to meet you I’m a 40 year old with no safety net but the one I made for myself
I was just out of for a year and had to live off savings and do small gigs. My community I’ve built on my own for the last 20 years (including my friend jacquesm) sent me money and bought me food and took me to the doctor…
Luckily I got a full time startup job a month before i was insolvent but i have to rebuild my finances
Oh and simultaneously I’m starting a residential waste cooperative that won’t make me any money by design
Risk taking tolerance can be taught but you need to have an unquenchable fire and be intelligent
> Where do you find fellow 40 year olds that can also take risks like you're both 20? I'm asking seriously because I'm also 40 and able to take a risk thanks to saving up some money
On HN, apparently! You guys should get together and take some risks. Frankly, I'd much rather work with 40-year olds than 20-year olds. You may not get the same energy, but you're also much less likely to see your coworker throwing up in the office for half the day after that binge drinking night before.
I think being "20 years old" in this context is more about "20 years ago". Where are the successful young 20yo founders in 2024? Recent golden-child SBF is 31 and ran a failed crypto scam! It would be unhealthy to misinterpret "youth" and "economic golden age" as the same thing. It is purely a coincidence that they may coincide for some generations.
Successful people come from bimodal distribution: 1. people who have good safety nets
2. people with absolutely traumatic backgrounds
In both cases you “have nothing to lose” in the sense of, if your attempt fails, you’re back to where you started.
For the middle-class person failing hard, but having no safety net means you do get a reduction and so most people who fall into this category are the most risk adverse.
On the other hand, people who have been homeless or in excessively traumatic situations are basically like it’s never gonna be that bad again, and I survived it so I can handle basically anything.
I fall into that second category, which is why I start so much stuff including building communities, literally everywhere I go
>> "Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something."
>> "Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on."
>> "Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work."
>> "Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
Perhaps that's objectively true or maybe that's just your perspective (ie, what your level of resilience can handle)
Like your classmates I joined a risky startup as employee 1 during the great recession, but unlike them I didn't have any backstop. Failure would have hurt but it wouldn't have been catastrophic - including rent and income-based college loan repayment my monthly nut was maybe $1k. When I was short on cash I took a job at nights doing phone tech support and later building websites for local businesses in my spare time. That isn't to say there weren't bumps (had my first run-in with the IRS -- and debt collectors) but to me there was always a way to make ends meet. Of course i owed some of that to being young and healthy without dependents, and the availability of $600/month apartments...
For myself, I think it was true. Other grads that 'failed' either took a job in the trades, or moved back in with parents. I had a disability, trades were off the table. It wasn't really safe for me to live under the same roof as my father, so living at home was out as well.
Maybe 'living under a bridge' is hyperbolic. I'm sure I could have couch surfed, or at worst lived out of my truck, but my life back then revolved around how many weeks or months living expenses I had on hand.
So true.....I had to turn around and give up many times because the bills needed paying, my parents were just as broke as me, and no rich friends....
I know a ton of people who had their credit cards paid, student loans paid, housing paid, car payments, etc .... parents all gave them the hand outs and helped them and they were able to constantly have fun, socialize and party and meet more and more people....I have been forced to work for reality
Yep, and it's made me reconsider my conservative risk tolerance now that I'm finally financially independent. I'm not sure if I should 'swing for the fences' or 'take a knee and run out the clock'. Probably the latter. I'm not sure I'm hungry enough to put up with a startup in my 40's.
according to statistics, many successful startups are by people in their 40s. ok, so if you are not hungry enough, that's fine, but i think being financially independent at 40 seems to be the best time to throw yourself into a startup. since you are already financially secure you don't have to overwork yourself, but you can take it a bit slower.
That's how some people operate. But I've met plenty of business owners who literally put their life savings on the line for their business ventures. In short, they do everything in your tl;dr, excepting that failure is absolutely not an option for them. I think many of us like to believe having the cushion is the thing that would set us free, but I know many people who took risks with no cushion, and many more who have the cushion and take no risks, to question that.
The article is more insightful than the title lets on. The author said employees should quit your demanding job and employers should help their employees instead of paying lip service about inner strength.
As for deeper changes, business self-help authors — who often make their real money not from selling books, but from paid speaking and consulting gigs at large companies — aren’t about to tell you to quit your draining job and take a (perhaps lower-paid) role at a less-demanding organization.
Nor do most of them suggest policy changes that contribute to a more resilient workforce — such as paid sick days, parental leave or flexible staffing models — that cost companies money. It’s safer for their business model to keep emphasizing inner strength. And maybe, too, that message plays well with an audience that hates to admit there can be trade-offs.
You'll have evil corp pushing their employees to the max. Then HR sends an email "we care about your mental health", which includes a link to an e-course on meditation.
They do not care about your mental health because they don't spent a second addressing the root cause of the overload of stress.
All of society now has this fatalism built in. The believe that we can fix problems and improve life for all is largely gone. Instead, the energy is that we accept that the future is bleak, make no effort to change it, expect things to perpetually get even worse, and somehow at an individual level try to find some marginal happiness within this reality we see as a given.
I'm personally not as pessimistic as the above suggests, just saying this is the culture.
I see a whole lot of people talking about net givers and net takers and how these dynamics affect the usefulness of a friend/acquaintance group.
This is HN. Private bit torrent trackers anyone? The higher your seed-to-leech ratio in a small community, the more use the community will be to you.
This applies directly to friend groups. If each person tries to seed the group with actions that benefit many but are trivial for them to accomplish based on personal stats, everyone benefits disproportionately to the individual effort invested. High ratios can then be tapped for uncommon and/or infrequent requests without compromising relationships.
Based on the headline, I expected this article to argue that success in business depends more on connections and resources than it does purely on resilience.
I agree with the title, I don't think it matter how resilient you are if you have no friends and no money. The Veritasium YouTube channel debunked the fact that money doesn't make you happier (it does) and that there's a plateau (there isn't). I also learnt from Jordan Peterson that you only get positive emotion if you follow a goal. You can't follow a goal if you have no money.
Anecdote: being poor is the most soul crushing thing that has happened to me. In my early 20s, I would go dancing sometimes and someone would approach me saying "you should buy me a drink" and I remember saying no because I had like 50$ total. Note, I was not blessed with loving parents. I don't know for sure, but I am willing to bet that people with more money have more friends with higher quality and deeper bonds then people with less money. I do think this plateaus however.
> In my early 20s, I would go dancing sometimes and someone would approach me saying "you should buy me a drink" and I remember saying no because I had like 50$ total.
it really isn't. He declined buying a drink for someone who was asking them to buy them a drink, something I always do even though I can definitely afford it.
The idea that it plateaus is a well studied phenomenon; most people don’t get significantly happier after 75k or so a year. I also think it’s very odd to suggest people with money (I’m imagining someone rich) have deeper bonds than poor people since my intuition would have led me to the opposite conclusion (poor people are more reliant on their communities).
Your anecdote is really interesting cause, while being poor is absolutely soul crushing, dating is an area that shouldn’t need to be expensive, yet social expectations that men be the breadwinners (outdated, since everyone is forced to work now) lead many women to absolute dicks about men not having a bunch of money.
> yet social expectations that men be the breadwinners (outdated, since everyone is forced to work now)
Still plenty of stay-home moms who raise the kids and make the home. I don’t think your comment about that way of life being outdated is accurate, and I predict that because of automation the over-all need for labor will decline such that we will necessarily as a society go back to breadwinners and caretakers working together to build a household.
You may be right about the division of labor reverting (though i sort of doubt it) but i think its unlikely to have its original gender divide since our social norms have shifted so much.
> The idea that it plateaus is a well studied phenomenon; most people don’t get significantly happier after 75k or so a year.
That claim is 100% bullshit and I'm surprised anybody on HN would ever believe it. Just consider housing prices alone!
Where was that study done? Bumfuck, Nowhere, where a 2,000 sq ft house is $50K and you can live like a king on $30/hr? Was it done in 1990 or something?
Go to ANY major city and $75K/year won't even buy you a modest condo, let alone a house. You'll struggle to even raise a family in an apartment on that.
I can certainly tell you that I'm much happier making $200K/year than when I was making $100K/year. $100K paid all the bills and still had decent disposable income. $200K means I can buy a $2,000 GPU and not feel like I need to budget for it. $200K means I can buy my $150,000 dream car. $200K means I can buy prime-quality ribeye on a whim and not care that it's $30/lb. It means flying first class to Italy when I go on vacation, rather than flying coach to somewhere in the USA.
I can't fathom how ANYBODY can think the plateau happens at $75K. Absolute and utter nonsense.
I gave specifics, but try taking a broader interpretation.
I touched on the topic of housing. I think most families would be happier in a ~2000 sq ft house rather than a <1000 sq ft apartment[0]. Certainly you can accept that truth without needing a peer-reviewed study of people's housing preferences. You can't buy a 2000 sq ft house on $75K/year unless you're in the middle of nowhere.
[0] Note that I mean MOST, not ALL. There are some people that despise single-family homes and prefer the higher-density aparments/condos, but I think they're a minority.
Happiness may plateau, but life satisfaction does not. And there has been subsequent research that casts doubt on the idea that happiness plateaus. Happiness has a large endogenous component i.e. it is the nature of the individual to be more or less happy on average.
I would argue that life satisfaction is much more important than happiness generally regardless.
> most people don’t get significantly happier after 75k or so a year
I call hard bullshit. Without even considering luxury spending, just not having to think about money very often is incredibly nice, and $75k is nowhere near any kind of plateau on that.
At $75k you had damn well better still be tallying up how much money's going in your cart at the grocery store. Not having to do that for basic stuff anymore, not having to worry much about coupons or bargain-shopping and just being able to say "I need this, or at least it would be very nice to have" and get it, no worry, no saving, no waiting for a sale, is such a GIGANTIC load off one's mind.
Car breaks? Take it to the shop, any plausible bill won't trash your budget for the month, let alone the year. Water leak? Yeah you could fix the drywall... but if you really don't feel like it this time, or are busy, you can just have someone else do it and the bill won't sting that bad. Groceries? Barely even pay attention to the total. Need some particular clothes for some purpose? Just buy them, and decent ones that won't look like shit and do fit right, at that. Kid breaks their arm? The cost barely even crosses your mind (it'll suck, but you'll be fine).
A relief doesn't make you happy though. It just makes you not stressed. IME there's totally a plateau where you realise more money just means more expensive toys with minimal increase in actual fulfilment or happiness.
Not being anywhere near as stressed, and spending at-most 5% as much time thinking and worrying about money as I did when we were struggling, sure frees up a lot of energy and time to pursue happiness, if not providing it directly (i.e. not even counting when I'm able to trade cash for things like free time to play with my kids or spend more quality time with my wife, let alone buying toys, which, hell, is also genuinely nice).
I'm certainly grateful every damn time we have some mid-tier emergency pop up and the part of my brain dedicated to money just goes "hm, that's a shame" and then shuts up, rather than screaming "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK" for a day or three. It'd be madness to suggest there's not a strong correlation between that relief and general happiness.
Again, it's the 'way over 75k' part. A few hundred k max (and that's assuming a family), and there's not much difference after that.
I think a true sense of purpose to life is likely to make someone far happier, and ironically money can't buy that. Same with most things really worth having.
Its probably in the hundreds of thousands range according to newer studies. Think practically about whether you can do different things with 10mil than 100mil and whether those things are likely to make you happy.
If money makes you happy why do so many celebs die of drug overdoses? By your logic they should be constantly dancing in the streets. Instead we have morons like Trump.
If you can't infer from those peoples' behaviour money doesn't make you happy, I think you've got a long learning curve ahead of you.
What're suicide and OD rates like for non-famous trust fund kids? How often does a Rockefeller error none of us have ever heard of OD? (Maybe it's very high, I don't know)
Safety, improved-probability-of-continued-comfort, options, and freedom-of-action do great things for most people's happiness, and those are what money is.
I’m very much aware. I grew up in a poor family and was lucky to break out of the cycle in my 20s.
That said, a club typically has people wanting free drinks and people not wanting to reciprocate. This environment is setting oneself up to be taken advantage of.
Right, but as soperj said, the people you miss out on are the people who will dump you because you won't spend money on them. Missing out on them is likely to be a net win.
This sort of gaslighting is incredibly common. The resilience we need is against believing a word any company says. You're only ever one 'company reset' [0] [1] away from the kerb.
Pretty galling that we have one of the most prominent capitalist cheerleaders out here telling us we need more friends and money when they have such an outsized influence on the reasons we have neither.
I'd suppose it's a reference to rich people having far more influence on public and economic policy than the working class, and those policies in turn having a substantial effect both on how people interact and who has money, especially when examined over a decades-long time horizon.
I’ll do my best but I wont pretend to be the best person to talk about this.
The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human.
To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days.
Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.
Surplus value is an essential piece to any of this actually working - if you don't have surplus value, there's no signal to inform on where our collective energy/ resources should be focused.
If there's a lot of surplus value in building a chair, that's a sign that we need more chairs. If you can't generate surplus value with the 7th coffee shop in the same city block, that's a sign there's too many coffee shops.
Any system that aims to remove surplus value removes this signal, which leaves you with a centrally controlled economy/system - and those tend to not only never work (at basically any scale) but tend to make everyone's life worse and worse over time and/or fail catastrophically.
Also, for what it's worth, I think you might be projecting on to some assumptions you have about janitorial work.
There is no actual argument that distributed greediness via profit signaling leads to the right social system, either. At best you have a heuristic, just like how many algorithms are heuristics. You can't argue heuristics as if they are the absolute truth.
Surplus value can continue to exist but as it is today it goes directly to the capitalist class via stock buybacks and dividends, rather than back to the workers.
One thing I can never understand about people who work in tech complaining about Marxist labor exploitation: why don't you start your own business? I've had multiple coworkers who are into this leftist stuff, and I know they have orders of magnitude more money than it takes to buy the capital equipment needed to run the exact business they work for, given that they've been making a tech salary for years and computers are incredibly cheap. By their own estimate, they have the skills and understanding necessary to create the product themselves. So why don't they do it?
My intuition is that the missing "surplus value" exists within the answer to that question.
Because that becomes your life, that's the answer. The people who are willing to take those risks are very well compensated for it when they pan out. But there's a very reasonable belief that the labor market should be fair, free of exploitation, and that you should have basic protections and a civil means to address your grievances that aren't just quitting, starting your own business, or dragging your boss out of their office and either murdering them or beating the shit out of them as was customary historically.
For everyone who starts there own business there are two to four orders of magnitude of employment contracts so almost by definition starting your own business can't be a solution for everyone.
No, but I think they frequently make the mistake of assuming goods/services have globally defined values. It's possible for both the buyer and seller of something to come out ahead in a deal.
The option to start their own business is right in front of them. They even have a group of like-minded individuals with complementary skills that they could form a co-op with. Since they don't do that, obviously they're getting something from being a W-2 worker. It seems to me that they're not accounting for that something when asserting that there's some surplus value they're creating but not capturing. More accurately, that "surplus value" is being traded for whatever it is they get from W-2 work (e.g. a steady buyer for their labor).
IIUC Marx says roughly that laborers are beholden to capital owners because they need access to that capital to be able to perform their labor. But lots of programmers/IT people have better equipment at home than their job provides (e.g. multiple large 4k displays, powerful CPUs, plentiful RAM). Many also have hobby homelab or colocated machines that they could easily run a business off of. They don't need access to someone else's capital, but they still sell their labor.
It's the same as when people say that geo pay is "fair" because of cost-of-living differences. You're buying something (e.g. living 15 minutes from the ocean in an area with year-round perfect weather and lots of things to do) with that cost of living. Otherwise--obviously--you'd go somewhere else.
I feel like this article is targeting a generation... Its message is mixed, but the conclusion is spot on. You need money, friends, and a thick skin/patience (and all that is hard work, on top of your job).
Flaws in the current system are still flaws regardless of if there's an alternative on the table. Capitalism does suck but it's not even the system we've got - we've got this weird mix of free and un-free markets that we live under that resembles capitalism on a good day, but more closely resembles anarchy a lot of the time because there aren't government regulations and when there are, there's regulatory capture so the powers that be do what they want and the rest of us just line in their world.
We're allowed to complain about the shortcomings of the system we live under and as humans we find connection by finding commonalities with others, even though we may not have a solution for any of the problems. You might be unable to have problems you can't fix, but everyone else has to live with them.
For millions of people living in poverty and homeless around the world and in the US itself, the capitalism system is a failure. Point. Now, you and lots of other people may be benefiting, but there is no point in saying it is a success when literally millions out there have been left out in the cold by this supposedly great system. This is true of any system that will let a large proportion of the planet living in misery for so long. There is no point in celebrating wealth for the few and misery for so many.
> For millions of people living in poverty and homeless around the world and in the US itself, the capitalism system is a failure.
You're blaming an economic framework for what in the majority of cases is failure of government. Frankly half a million homeless Americans is far better than the current alternatives of Russia or China... It isn't a very good point.
in 1950 the average American home was 900 ish sq ft. Today the average American has 900sqf of space IN their home. We went from united fruit (misery where governments were weak) to fruit, coffee, tea, chocolate, cobalt, nickel... Americans got fat, and everyone else had the same level of suffering (maybe).
Candidly it's been "a large proportion of the planet living in misery" forever. We're still the same monkeys who raped and murdered the neanderthals out of existence, we haven't really evolved since we salted the earth at Carthage.
Look at the USSR, everyone was going to get a house, and a car and a.... Status wasn't about money it was about who got one first. At a point in Chinese communism status was indicated by pens (how many, if you keep them in a pocket)... The way you got ahead in these systems was graft, bribery and birthright. At least in the US and EU there is some sense of being able to elevate myself and a path to get there. The problem is that some people don't want to take it, they don't want to put the work in. The reality is that their quality of life is going to decline in the continuing global future because there isn't enough to go around.
The current trend of wealth leading to decline in population (birth rate below replacement) is fascinating. The US makes up for it with immigration, china and Japan not so much, and Europe is going to have a cultural shift because of it. The next few decades will be interesting.
The reality is that we're picking the option that sucks the least. I, am not happy about it, but no one has shown up with a better alternative that WORKS.
> half a million homeless Americans is far better than the current alternatives of Russia or China
except that the USA is a rich country, from the point of view of capitalist competition, for more than 100 years. If a place like the USA cannot solve the plague of misery and homelessness (not to talk about the lack of basic health care) then what can you expect from the rest? It is definitely a failure of capitalism to solve these fundamental issues. The USA and other countries should seriously rethink their economic system before it is too late.
Im not sure what this is, but there is no place or point in history where a mass of people has been more well off than the US at present. Fraud, corruption, homelessness were always going to have some degree of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889
What is interesting is that there are places in the states where they are doing a great job with homelessness. Houston springs to mind, and that (politically) is shocking till you look at why and how they fixed it... They removed the incentive to compete, and changed how people are placed.
How will we ever find something that sucks less if we aren't honest about the downsides of our current model of capitalism?
I don't need to show you something proven to be better to ask that question unless you have some kind of creationist-like belief that all systems have been discovered and tried.
>> we aren't honest about the downsides of our current model of capitalism?
1930's United fruit. I dont think we're gonna argue that they were "good" but their impact was bad in the face of weak governments.
In the US we have our 3 branches. We also have Adams 4th branch (jury nullification). There is the 4th estate / first amendment. And then there is corporations. Corporations having some influence on government is good but the US is leaning into too much territory, and Europe too little. Change isn't hard in the US, it's motivating people out of apathy to get it done that is hard.
If you want change it isn't about "honest about the suck" its about motivating me and everyone else to buy into something enough to put down the phone and get off the couch and make that change happen.
It turns out reality is slightly more complicated than raw game theory, which is basically just what you described.
To be honest, it sounds like you might be internally cynical and externally giving, and exhausted seeing the results.
Most of us quite frankly weren't raised to optimize our own social networks, but over time I've realized it's not that difficult to create a mutual understanding from which everyone can better respect/build themselves and each other up. (e.g. this favor you asked requires a lot more of me than it saves for you, therefore, it's an impolite ask and it's a no)
Frankly though most people don't think that far ahead. Without "training" or manners, the common man is generally prone to his selfishness. It's never been a secret or a revelation, but people enjoy their extremisms.
'giving people what they want' is not zero sum, nor is it uniform.
While I don't agree with the parent commenter, his message can be understood in multiple ways.
Look at me and my partners - I have lots of executive function, but little empathy, my wife has lots of empathy, but not as much executive function. She provides me an emotional sink when I need one, and I provide here stability and planning - we're both giving and taking from each other freely, but those are things we each have in excess. For our other partner we both provide him a level of support that he's on the right path, and a place to vent excess feelings (which she can take because of her empathy, and I can take because of my lack of empathy).
If I look thru my social network, I can see similar pairings - people give me things that I lack, and I give them the things I have in excess. People who end up being net takers, don't end up sticking around long (they make themselves unwelcome), and net givers end up burning themselves out - you need to keep things in balance.
I agree with some of this, but I’ve come to believe that so many people are takers because the modern world somewhat imposes the necessity of it.
There is a remarkable disparity in how much people can create value and be of service to their communities. As such, a huge disparity in incomes as well. Worse still, a lot of how we value things is increasingly through and economic lens. I think a lot of modern cultures are beginning to devalue individuals and create a sense of helplessness among many people because they don’t have the cognitive faculties required to be effective and productive under these conditions and within these benchmarks of perceived value.
I think this will get worse because the reality is that people aren’t getting much smarter, but the smarter people are increasingly able to accomplish more with less.
This is certainly facile and there is more to this, but my intuition is that it’s a significant component. In other cultures, especially more traditional cultures, this ratio of givers and takers seems less askew and people have clearer roles and purpose.
To wrap up, I don’t blame people for being takers so to speak. There are greater forces at work. I imagine them like leaves floating down a stream, nowhere near as much in control of their course as we expect they should be or imagine otherwise.
A world that expects us to excel intellectually in order to succeed will leave a lot of people behind no matter what. I suspect something like half of people by default.
I think people are downvoting you because of the way you delivered the message rather than the content of the message.
As I've gotten older, I've realized it is actually more healthy to view professional contacts in this manner (but not necessarily family). It helps compartmentalize their behavior (which is intrinsically self-motivated) to just being "how the game is played".
I’m sorry you’ve never experienced “friends” who are more than takers/givers.
My parents have had friends who have helped them when they’ve needed them and vice versa. I’m also fortunate that so far my friends have done the same as well and I’ve had the privilege to help them in their need.
I came to that realisation a few months before the lockdowns, so I was in the lucky position that my life didn't change very much at all - instead of being isolated at work, I was isolated at home and didn't have to put on a happy face.
One of the case studies that led me to the same conclusions as you was somebody that I had been helping regularly for years just casually mentioned how she wasn't spending time with one of her friends anymore because he was depressed.
Many others treated me like a professional supplier of several services, but only ever hung out with me when they really had nothing else going on.
Nowadays I only put up with people asking for emotional support (or any support really) if we made some good memories together in the last three months. If they chose to spend their time with others all this time, then they might as well go ask them for help.
The interesting thing about friends is that whatever we believe about them, we will find ourselves with friends that reinforce that belief. You can choose almost any prophecy you want and it will self-fulfill.
Thus, what we believe about friends ultimately says little about other people and much about ourselves.
Being a net taker or net giver still means you take and give, you just do more of one than the other. I don’t see why this means they’d refuse to assist. People aren’t pure takers and givers.
I’d argue the vast majority of people would like to be givers, but they lack the ability, security, and situational awareness in order to follow through on it.
Most people in my life seem to jump at the opportunity to help if I make my needs clear. I don’t need to ask at all, it’s just a matter of if I present a problem or situation that they know and can solve. I’m much the same way. Perhaps it’s because of who I’ve surrounded myself with, but I find strangers tend to lean this way as well. People want to help. They just need to know how and be able to. Crossing that gap is usually the hard part.
It's easy for people to dismiss you as a cynic, but you are probably right. I learnt this when I was young and in a situation where I was in desperate need of someone to relieve me because of overwork. People who I though of as good friends didn't want to help me out for even one day (with good pay). Not lift a finger in the slightest to help a friend. The experience really turned my world upside down when it happened.
But I also learnt that there are people that you can rely on and get help from, even if you were never close to them. Because that's just how they are as people.
I think it was much easier to know in the past who you could count on, because life was harder and you'd pretty soon be in a situation where you'd find out quickly who to trust. People didn't have time for endless socialisation without action.
In my experience, the loose group of acquaintances is actually really good at getting support from, so long as you aren't a taker and are generally in good standing.
You're being down voted I presume because people don't understand just how harmful toxic circles of friends and family can be.
My wife and I have polar opposite backgrounds - I had a small group of supportive friends and family, and she had a group of friends and family that, she came to realize, only wanted her around when they needed something from her.
Unlike you, she didn't cut missy l most of them out completely, but she has been rebuilding those relationships with much healthier boundaries.
It's a work in progress, though, because there's a lot of bad water to get under the bridge, so to speak.
That said, she's happier than she's ever been, and far less stressed.
What is your take on philosophies which would encourage you instead to be more patient with people and anticipate their needing and insecurity? From that perspective, becoming a better man would mean becoming more patient, compassionate, and at ease with the way people typically are.
I’m not saying I disagree. I find the contrast in views really interesting.
They are just that - philosophies. I live my life based on first-hand experience only, not the musings of a professor or even a poet. And I'm sorry to say it is as follows: not all people deserve compassion, nor patience. Most of the people I've come across in life are plainly stupid by choice, and a stupid person is the most dangerous kind.
On the other hand, individuals with special needs, children and animals are mostly defenseless in this world and actually deserve our attention. I have focused my time and resources on helping them (versus the family and friends "in need") and this has proven to be more fulfilling, and I believe ultimately more selfless than my past self.
Nice, that’s a great answer. I agree that service to people and animals who are truly in need is a great calling. I wish I realized it a lot earlier in my life.
> Kafka’s Metamorphosis describes the situation quite well, with Gregor Samsa tirelessly supporting his family until the day he turns into an insect and discovers that with his usefulness gone his family no longer cares for him.
Friendship and family are different. It is a man's primary purpose to provide for his family, and the love they have for him is conditional on his usefulness. This is a primary biological imperative and works this way across 99% of species.
A man in a friendship is not required to provide for other friends, but it is encouraged to raise his intergroup status.
> A man in a friendship is not required to provide for other friends, but it is encouraged to raise his intergroup status.
That's an upside-down perspective on friendship. "Friendship" and "intergroup status" have nothing to do with each other. Somebody who wouldn't help you is not a friend, and any group that has "intergroup status" is a mob and not a group of friends.
Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.