I'm pushing 50 now, but I'd already decided long ago that my ambition in the first half of my life is to accumulate enough wealth that I don't need to offer the second half to someone else to maintain my security.
Being compelled to do something on a boss's behalf sucks, no matter how interesting the work. I have hundreds of possible projects that I want to do, all categorized in priority order. I've done a number of them already, but the progress is glacial simply because the best hours of my days are taken up building someone else's product of dubious benefit to mankind.
I'm in countdown mode, counting the days until I can focus full time on my open source projects.
Maybe you don't live in the right country. I've been an employer as well as an employee. And being an employee is super super relaxing compared to being an employer. You don't have to worry about 1000 things at the same time, many things aren't your responsibility. You don't have to worry about variable income and ways to protect against that. You don't have to worry about getting sick — in this country I have to pay you for a max of 2 years if you have a long-term illness. And it's nearly impossible to fire you: if you misbehave or underperform then I have to go through a mandatory performance improvement plan for at least 6 months before I can even ask permission from the state to fire you.
When I look at large companies that employ people, e.g. banks or insurance companies, I see employees that are much more relaxed than I was when I was a small company employer. The stability such large company jobs give you is amazing. At these companies I also see a fair number of freelancers but inevitably they are much more stressed than the regular employees due to having to deal with multiple clients and no illness income insurance by default.
So I can't recognize the "being compelled to do something on behalf of a boss", at all. As a boss, I was compelled to do all sorts of things in order to keep the company running and in order to be able to pay all my employees. Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.
You misunderstand. I have no interest in being an employer (been there, done that, got the useless equity). I'm an employee now because it's the easiest way to reach my goal. Once I reach it, I can finally stop building things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and instead focus 100% on improving humanity's chances (as opposed to the 20% I manage now).
Improving our chances of surviving as a species into future millennia and beyond by giving the human race every edge I can within my wheelhouse while I'm still breathing.
I've had to hold down a full time job, so I've only managed small things like crash reporting, emulation, metalanguage syntax, and a generalized data format. But I have more ambitious projects to greatly improve the energy-efficiency, openness, and robustness of our communications systems, which I plan to leverage into some of my real-world projects going forward (once nice feature is that it will become harder for autocratic regimes to "shut down the internet").
Sorry to be inquisitive, I'm genuinely curious to understand. What drives you to improve chances of humanity to survive? What if it survives but the societal format will be totalitarian? What if the existence will be meaningless ... something along the lines of "brave new world"?
What's your motivation and expectations? Do you have a moral principle or belief you can describe that forms the basis of your desire?
What's the origin of your beliefs - a lot of people here cite works of science fiction.
Where do you see humanity in the best case scenario? What's the best possible end game?
What's the end game for you - would this be some kind of immortality project? i.e. your name will stay around or so.
Sorry again if this comes of a bit off. I admire the resolve and understand the time spent working on meaningless stuff. Just genuinely curious about the belief system (myself I'mat the same point but I think of going other way, more small scale stuff).
>And being an employee is super super relaxing compared to being an employer.
If you're starting a business or just run something that barely gets profit yes. Else, after you have a cool few million in the bank, it's only stressful if you want it to be stressful and you're that type.
>Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.
For billions of people around the world (including hundreds of million in the first world), employees are expected to suck it up and work late nights, do whatever BS the employeer asks them to, work to the bone for minimum wage, and so on, if they even want to put food on the table. And they don't end up with any equity, even if they did all the hard work, and the employer is just some trust fund baby with family connections who just had some hazy "ideas"...
You make it sound like it's trivial. "After you have a million" could be 10-15 years of weekend-work-and-no-holidays later.
> For billions of people around the world, employees are expected to suck it up and work late nights
Then call for your government to introduce better labor laws. You can't just blame all this on "the bosses" as a big homogenous groups. Here in the Netherlands, bosses in fact cannot expect employees to "just suck it up and work late nights": employees have to agree and get compensated. And if they don't agree, they cannot be fired for disagreeing.
> Well, for billions of employees it never is, even after 30+ years of hard labor.
This is not a good comparison. You are right that the answer is "never". But the other side of the coin is that, as a Dutch full-time employee, you enjoy incredible stability, something which employers don't have.
The employer might get rich after 10 years of hard work. Or the employer may (much more likely) go bankrupt.
As an employee you are not required to work more than the contracted 40h/week. Yes you will never get rich, but you also don't really have the risk of going bankrupt next month. You are not required to do more than 9-5. You don't have to work overly hard.
Heck even if you lose your job and you can't find a new one, the state will give you a minimum income. You aren't rich but it's also nearly impossible for you to end up in poverty.
If you want to have a shot at getting rich, then start your own company and take the risks of going bankrupt at any moment until you make it. Instead of complaining that you can't get rich while also enjoying stability.
This is also the position of the Dutch tax authority. I once once tried giving employees equity (while also giving salary). The tax authority was like: you can't give them equity for free, they have to buy it from you. I asked why, because I never bought my own stocks. They said: because they're carrying none of the risk, so it's not a fair business transaction if they get it for free; they must pay for it and also pay taxes over the transaction.
>This is not a good comparison. You are right that the answer is "never". But the other side of the coin is that, as a Dutch full-time employee, you enjoy incredible stability, something which employers don't have.
Perhaps, but if only the employer-employee relationship only happened in the Netherlands [1], and not in 120+ other countries. Because in most places "incredible stability" is less than a pipe dream.
([1] And in relatively recent Netherlands, because historically workers there didn't have it as good, and with new neoliberal laws passed and prior rights eroded, workers increasingly they don't have it as good as more "socialist" decades past).
I think it's exceedingly important to recognize that life is finite, and to reflect upon this regularly. I think its so important that I created an android wallpaper that shows what percentage of your life is already past. This helps me ensure that I'm spending my limited time in the most valuable way possible, and really helps put things in perspective.
This isn't the first time I've shared these links, but I hope it doesn't come across as spammy because 1) I'm not selling anything and 2) articles like this keep getting posted, which implies this is a topic some people are just discovering
Memento mori may be depressing, but once you embrace it I know no better way to gain the motivation to do the things I truly want with my life.
How many Sunday afternoons with my young children do I get? That's not even about death, just that they will grow up one day soon. How many of them do I want to spend getting paged about some bullshit database problem? Or scrolling mindlessly on my phone?
People beat themselves up about this a lot. White people love to hate themselves.
Sure, your employer will reward your commitment by laying you off once you're of age, but it doesn't take much to end up estranged from your adult kids despite a lifetime of effort expended there either.
Hold out for grandchildren. It's the fun part of parenting without the responsibilities.
I don't beat myself up about this. Hating myself is why I let myself be abused with obscene on-call for years. Respecting myself and deciding what I cared about in life is what allowed me to quit that job, even though it was secure.
Tomorrow is not guaranteed - but that recognition doesn't have to be a morbid or depressing viewpoint, it can just as easily be a motivator to stop procrastinating.
Still not sure if I'll keep it, but like another commenter said, perhaps I'll embrace my percentage and just make the most out of what's left.
Cowardly (or cunningly?) I set the background to pure black like my regular wallpaper and the text to almost-black. So I think I'll forget about the wallpaper and every now and again, the percentage will jump at me late at night. Let's see :)
It’s a nice article, but I think it’s a little privileged as well. I’m only on my 40ies and I see a lot of it in myself. I was lucky enough to get to do some work that had a national impact in my early 30ies and I was well on my way to a career in management before I found out I didn’t really care about that. So I went back to programming, and still being fortunate, I’ve been able to find work at places that let me avoid too much project management and other things I dislike.
But that’s privileged, and while you may be fortunate enough to find yourself in those situations, or even in one where you can chose whether you want to retire or not, that’s not really how life is for most people. I’m not sure how this article will read for people who don’t have the choice. If I could only get jobs that requires a lot of time-management in Atlassian, or whatever PM tools you use to torture developers, I’d burn out, not because I didn’t know what motivated me but because I had to earn money by dealing with what was available to me. I imagine it’s even worse for people who aren’t in a line of work that is a buyers market.
I’m all aboard the “don’t let age stop you” thing that the article also preaches, and I hope you and I get to be lucky enough to live the life where we can continue doing what we like well into our retirement ages, but realistically, a lot of us won’t.
I like the way Jim Carrey puts it in a speech based on a lesson learned from his father: You can fail at something you hate so you might as well do what you love. Then if you fail, at least you tried.
An important but gentle pushback against things like this (tracking how much time you "have left"): if stuff like this isn't helping you, it isn't worth the reminder either. For some people the scarcity mindset is a motivating factor, for others it's a paralyzing one and for the latter I would encourage to consider this sort of conversation utterly meaningless and therefore wholly dismissable, not even worth the time in clicks.
Yep thanks. I'm solidly in this group of people for whom this kind of thing is counterproductive. To the extent that I honestly can't even imagine the mindset of people who find this motivating. Making me depressed and anxious about how I'm spending my time is the door into the doom loop for me, not the door out of it.
Also consider those of us that need to be paralyzed long enough to consider what we are scare of so we can have space to address it and make changes. It's okay to be paralyzed, knocked-down, or fail at times.
Sometimes busyness is a blind that can be removed no other way.
Articles like this kind of have an unstated assumption that we should aspire to be as productive as possible, or spend time on what matters most to us, or something along those lines. As if we're in some sense wasting our lives if we don't.
There's nothing wrong with those things, but the more I watch people I know die, the more I realize that it doesn't make any difference how productive you were or if you maximally enjoyed how you spent your time. You die and the world moves on.
It's okay to try to improve your situation, but it's also okay to punch in at 8:00 and punch out at 5:00 and go home and watch the evening news.
Running low on links alas, but I was somewhat relieved to run into the idea of Terror Management Theory a couple years back, which points out the conflict between safety/self preservation and the sense that life is running out. And explores how we cope. It was nice having some framing, having a perspective for analysis, with which to look at such the realest of real topics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
This works for some people but most time it feels grim and you count down to the end? Not for me. You make the best out of thing and that’s it, not need to think you are a ticking time bomb
I‘m turning 50 this week. I wish I’d noticed sooner that life is always „now“, not some distant future. All that productivity talk is good, but don’t forget about yourself now.
It’s people like this that limit their own potential because they allow old to be applied to their limits which limits them mentally, it may be true to some extent but it definitely not helpful to always say “I’m too old for this”
> but it definitely not helpful to always say “I’m too old for this”
While I largely agree with this statement, I've noticed that – even though I'm in my thirties and I don't feel old at all – I still catch myself saying "I'm too old for XYZ" occasionally, half jokingly, but also half seriously. I mean, sometimes it's not about age per se (as in: the number) but about the fact that you've "been there, done that". How do you maintain your excitement for something that you've done a bazillion times?
I'm in similar circumstances. Same age, a lot of intellectual interests, physically very active, don't feel old at all. And yet, that feeling of "been there, done that" is very recurring. When I think "I'm too old for XYZ", I take it as a sign that I've learned all I can from that type of experience and that I should move on to other pursuits.
>How do you maintain your excitement for something that you've done a bazillion times?
For me it's two things: 1) With a few special people, it doesn't matter if I've done something a million times, the interaction is always extremely rewarding and we always get new insights about what we're doing and the world; the activity is not novel in itself but there's a sense of progress in either skill or understanding; 2) Very obvious in theory: try something you've never tried before.
The hardest in my experience is to find friends who want to keep up with this. I crave novelty and progress of some sort, the feeling that I am a better person today than I was yesterday. I don't have a hard time meeting people, but it's getting harder and harder to find (and keep) my tribe. I suspect a lot of us feel something similar – this craving for a community of people you can relate to, spending time together, learning together, working together towards some shared goal. It's hard to make this happen at work and I haven't found it in hobbies either. The closest I've been to fulfilling this itch is with occasional side projects with others, retreats of different kinds, slow travelling, etc. I'd love to figure this out and make it happen more often with more people.
Yeah but I mean only for when someone says it about their abilities, sometimes is true but most times is just that person talking himself out of it. And Yes I’m too old for raves
I would define "old" as the age when one can no longer adapt. There are common trends like people older than Gen X struggling to learn how to use a smartphone. Or attachment to antiquated notions around gender roles, for example.
But if I'm being honest, I stopped adapting sometime in the mid-2000s, also when smartphones arrived and Moore's law for CPUs ended with attention shifting to GPUs. I just haven't had passion for most tech since, because most of it looks derivative to me or even like a step backwards. I simply can't work the way that I'd like to with current technology. And the barriers to entry around stuff like semiconductor manufacturing are so high that I can't use my degree there. So in a very real sense, I can't do anything but wait for the stuff I daydreamed about back in the 90s, that I thought would be here by now.
Like how Paul Graham said we compress 40 years of work into 4 year working at startups:
My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing-- though in that case it probably won't take four years.
I've been trying to win the internet lottery for almost 25 years without success, so mentally I'm somewhere around 250 years old. At this age the mental fatigue is almost all-consuming. I'm just so tired. Working this hard for so long without an equivalent amount of rest or a win has kept me in near-continuous burnout for more than half my life now. Subjective time at 45 years old passes about 3 times faster than wall time (assuming 1:1 at 15). So I'm finally punctual, not by adding a time buffer, but by dividing the time before an appointment by 3. If I have an hour to be somewhere, I really only have 20 minutes.
I'm expecting that time compression to keep increasing at that rate as long as fundamental injustices in the world aren't addressed. Loosely that means that if we don't have UBI, true labor-saving AI, equal access to capital, etc etc etc so that we can pursue our life goals and feed our inner child, then I'll be compressed 9:1 by 65 and 27:1 by 85 (if the loss of social security finally eliminates retirement). At which point my mental clock won't be able to run fast enough to keep up with the churn of the modern world. The struggle will eventually come to dominate every facet of my life, while wealth inequality will have others sitting on lifetimes of money they could never spend. Somewhat ironically, I don't care how much money they have or what they do with it, only that I'm still under the yoke of forced labor as rents are artificially inflated well past the point of believability.
This was a cynical comment and I wish I hadn't written it. Also my math was wrong: 45-15 is 30, so if subjective time passes 3 times faster every 30 years, that would be 9x compression at 75. I'll just stop projecting right there.
Really, if you are already in a position where you can comfortably retire at your late 50s and early 60s, maybe the more responsible thing to do would be to retire, to give an opportunity to younger folks.
Rich boomers should try finding meaning in activities where they don't fuck every other generation that came after them.
If you really want to work, maybe you could do some non-profit stuff.
I didn’t down vote you but everyone deserves a chance even if you are “well off” because if you are still able but decide to shut down just because you have this zero sum game mentality, it’s worse as a whole
This is the outcome of the clash between equality vs. equity.
Equality doesn't mean equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity is equity, which is a communist lie.
It seems like a lot of folks bought into the idea that we can somehow achieve equity in society. Unfortunately, the pursuit of equity leads to totalitarianism of one sort or another.
I sort of agree. This reminds me of the article the other day asking more people to consider teaching, especially as an adjunct. The pay is absurdly low but as one commenter put it, they're probably hoping to find someone retired that doesn't really need the salary.
I'm not an employee or a boomer, but I do take exception with this zero-sum view. Productivity creates more opportunities. These people are not taking away a slice of the pie from young people. Instead they are creating a larger pie for everyone.
I have relatives who work for a police department. There are some people who have put in their 30 years (or whatever it is) and are entitled to collect most of their salary for the rest of their lives once they retire. But they don’t want to retire, so they continue to work basically for free. If they retired, somebody new would be hired to take their position. For jobs like that, it’s a zero-sum game.
Public or government managed positions are a bit of an exception. For the sake of illustration, I'll make an attempt. Of course this is strictly hypothetical.
The increased public safety from your experienced relative could create other opportunities in the city, such as a thriving retail sector. Whereas without that standard of public safety, shoplifting or other petty criminal activity might drive retailers away.
You can claim that the overall demand for police officers would be one less in this scenario. However the demand for retail employment and the demand for those goods sold by retail shops might increase. Therefore, the overall size of the pie has increased. We can extrapolate a few levels from this point. A growing retail sector might necessitate further public or private security roles.
Of course as with any example, there are probably several approaches to produce gotcha counter arguments. This is only meant to illustrate the larger point and not argue the specifics of the example.
I don’t think I explained it well. The employee is working for free from their perspective, not the county’s.
The employee could retire and collect 100% pension or they can continue to work and collect around the same amount of money as salary. If they don’t retire, then the budget hasn’t been freed up to hire the new person.
It’s different budgets, but it’s the same amount of tax money either way, so arguably it shouldn’t make a difference from the employer’s side as well. The budgets just would need to be organized differently.
This is assuming that more opportunities are being created in certain roles... Unfortunately there aren't being more house representatives, senators, etc. Professorships are increasingly rare. While you can argue that, roundaboutly, boomer executives and boomer equity owners (e.g. partners in law offices) can invest in more companies that will create new executive rooms and new partnership positions, the reality is we are actually seeing more and more corporate mergers which means less positions for upwards mobility.
Which is the objective we seek, full employment regardless of productivity concerns or productive allocations of finite resources?
I'd suggest that productive allocations increase our living standards, which is the goal of employment itself. Full employment for the sake of employment trends towards make-work, drudgery, high costs and low quality.
Being compelled to do something on a boss's behalf sucks, no matter how interesting the work. I have hundreds of possible projects that I want to do, all categorized in priority order. I've done a number of them already, but the progress is glacial simply because the best hours of my days are taken up building someone else's product of dubious benefit to mankind.
I'm in countdown mode, counting the days until I can focus full time on my open source projects.