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Right. Take care of yourself, deal with your mental issues, start every morning with cheap motivational yadda-yadda, improve your social skills -- and you can l

• cust0m 10y ago
  what a lucid comment
• tra3 10y ago
  What do you recommend? Lets remember that the opposite of crazy is still crazy.
  • zzzcpan 10y ago
    Not completely opposite. Trying to stay healthy is probably a good thing. But tricking yourself psychologically into a hard working employee is as crazy as it gets. You are not supposed to feel happy for being an employee and making money for someone else, because you are not in control of your own life.
    • jonmb 10y ago
      > But tricking yourself psychologically into a hard working employee is as crazy as it gets. You are not supposed to feel happy for being an employee and making money for someone else, because you are not in control of your own life. Fortunately there are no rules for what you are supposed to feel happy about. If you are convinced that being an employee means you should not be happy, then that's a (painful) psychological trick as well. Even if you run your own business, you still have customers to satisfy, so are they in control of your life? Regardless if you work for yourself or not, you are always working to provide value to someone else. You are always selling yourself; your abilities & time.
      • Stryder 10y ago
        Or, to put in a different thought, we are all subject to the physical realities of the world we live in, and we barter and trade what we each have with one another to better control the world itself, while being controlled by it simultaneously. Or, to put in even another way, Life.
    • nxc18 10y ago
      No one has ever had more control over their life than the privileged few enjoying the 9-5. In contemporary society, things are nice enough that people typically trade a fraction of their time in exchange for work, income, and reduced risk exposure. This is a nice comfy abstraction over the cold reality that you need resources to live and you need to work and fight to keep living. The alternatives to this are: a) socialism/communism type deal where the government controls your work output and resource provision; even if it works out (it usually doesn't), you have far less control than you do now. b) unspecialized agriculture-based society; every second of every day is spent producing just enough food and material goods long enough for you to raise children that take over when you die. Your options are limited; you are perilously exposed to acts of God (what happens if the crop fails?). You are not in control. c) hunter-gatherer setup; you are still not in control of your own life. You have no option than to spend the vast majority of your day seeking food (without agriculture you really do need to spend almost all of your time on that work). Ask one of these people what a 'weekend' or 'vacation' looks like. The reality is, modern society gives you many more options than were possible even 100 years ago. International (and even local) travel is commonplace; you can choose to start a startup or work for yourself; you can choose to buy or not buy hundreds of thousands of products, many of which were not existing or even possible in the recent past; etc. You can even choose to leave it all behind and live on the land. Don't confuse dissatisfaction with your own life choices with lack of control.
      • Trundle 10y ago
        Hunter gatherers did not spend the vast majority of their time seeking food. That's a myth that greatly perpetuates this nonsense that technology/progress have benefited mankind. They haven't. Things being better than 200 years ago doesn't mean they're better than 20 000 years ago.
        • nannePOPI 10y ago
          True, but they were in constant war with other tribes, animals, etc So, they were not better than today.
          • 10y ago
  • atemerev 10y ago
    I recommend following some of the things mentioned in the article (like taking care of physical and mental health), but not for your own sake, not for the sake of being a good employee. And if you can't handle it at some point -- you are not a bad person, neither have you failed at anything. Self-determination is what matters; and sometimes, you need any help you can get, and not the shame for what you can't do right now.
• chocolatebunny 10y ago
  How does one go about improving one's social skills.
  • cmdrfred 10y ago
    Find someone well liked and do an impression of them.
  • eightysixfour 10y ago
    Unless you suffer from social anxiety, you improve your social skills just like anything else - with intentional practice. If you want to be better at small talk, make small talk any opportunity you can (or become an Uber/Lyft driver, tour guide, or some other job that requires you to use these skills). If you want to be better at flirting, flirt. Make note of when you're practicing, try and look for social/body language cues and make adjustments. Replay the conversation later in your head and figure out places you can do better next time. Then try again.
    • arrosenberg 10y ago
      Even if you do have social anxiety practice helps alot. I'd recommend volunteering somewhere that you have to interact with a few new people regularly. It is less overwhelming than most social situations since volunteering is usually task-oriented (if you feel overwhelmed, just focus on the work), and it lets you practice making small talk with other people.
    • zardo 10y ago
      >Unless you suffer from social anxiety You do it the same way if you suffer from social anxiety. You are just forced to practice coping with anxiety at the same time.
      • eightysixfour 10y ago
        I don't have any experience with social anxiety or treatment personally, so I wanted to escape that portion of the discussion with what is essentially a disclaimer. I assumed the advice would apply but wasn't sure, so thanks for confirming that.
• socmag 10y ago
  Wow cool top comment! Which reminds me, I just watched an excellent documentary on Karl Marx which was very timely. It's largely forgotten what he was really about I think. Really hit home that his concept of the "Surplus Value" of a worker is just as important if not more so today as it was the day he critiqued capitalism in the 1800's. Shame about how his work was twisted into authoritarian dictatorship by the likes of Stalin. You just can't win :/ You really just nailed it though. Next week, back to Nietzsche.
  • duncan_bayne 10y ago
    Serious question: how do you think one _could_ implement Marx's solutions to the problems he claims he found, _without_ an authoritarian dictatorship? Not thinking so much small, voluntary communes but at the sort of scale of a modern city or State. I'm pretty sure it was Marx himself who first used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat".
    • kmonsen 10y ago
      I think size itself is a real problem, moving from Norway to the US politics are so different it is hard to understand. I don't think a country the size of the US, China or Russia can really be a democracy governed by and for the people.
      • duncan_bayne 10y ago
        Size is definitely a problem. Bertrand Russell touched on some of the issues it creates (e.g. signal - votes from the people effected by an issue - gets swamped by noise - votes from people who don't really care). Personally, I'm a big fan of a couple of approaches that I think would work well in concert: * Federalism. Devolve as much power as practical down to the State (or, as I suspect will happen, the City-State, level). Taking the USA as an example (I'm not American myself), you'd pare back all of the unconstitutional three-letter-departments (FCC, FDA, EPA, ...) and leave those up to the States. * Sortition. Don't select the Government by voting, select it by random poll of the citizenry, in much the same way as jury duty is arranged in many countries. * Libertarianism. Legislate to protect rights and in the case of collective problems (e.g. atmospheric pollution, which may surprise people by being the go-to example Rand reached for as a case where environmental legislation may be justified by human costs), but nothing else.
• npsimons 10y ago
  > Take care of yourself, deal with your mental issues Aside from your other complaints, what's wrong with these two pieces of advice? They seem like completely sensible things that far too many people eschew.
  • nimchimpsky 10y ago
    Not exactly insightful
    • munchbunny 10y ago
      Maybe not insightful, but it falls into the category of "obvious but not nearly enough people actually do it" alongside other things like flossing, saving for retirement, and checking array lengths. That sort of thing is definitely worth repeating.
      • chrisweekly 10y ago
        >"obvious... flossing... retirement... checking array lengths" Flossing is nearly useless (the studies that led to ADA recommendations turned out to be deeply flawed and inconclusive). Retirement is a historically relatively recent concept which doesn't make people happy. Some programming paradigms obviate the need for array length checks, eg with robust constructs for nil. I note these not to be argumentative, but to highlight that defining what's "obvious" as the right thing to do is anything but.
        • munchbunny 10y ago
          > Flossing is nearly useless (the studies that led to ADA recommendations turned out to be deeply flawed and inconclusive). Since we're going into a high level of detail, I want to point out that "nearly useless" implies that we've concluded no correlation. We actually just don't have a conclusion, so "we don't know" is much more accurate. I got your point, but let's make sure to stay on the right side of rigor. Retirement: feel free to substitute "retirement" with "time period at end of life that usually correlates with less ability to draw income." The advice is still sound whether or not you choose to retire at 65. There are exceptions, but if you're that rich, then you're a tiny exceptional minority of the potential audience of the advice. Array length checks: as long as indexing into arrays is a thing, it's going to remain good advice the vast majority of the time. Thankfully most modern languages realized that it's better if the language does the low level bounds checking for you, but high level bounds checking is still very much a thing. What counts as "obvious" is like what counts as a "heap" of sand. The exact line is subjective, but there's a point where pretty much everyone is in agreement. Defining what's "obvious" in the gray middle area is hard, but defining what's "obvious" or "not obvious" on the extremes tends to be far easier.
• skybrian 10y ago
  It doesn't seem very specific to capitalism. Most of this advice would work just as well for anyone who has an ambition to accomplish anything, whether it makes money or not.
• Sukotto 10y ago
  I read your comment as strongly sarcastic. Do you mean it that way? Because it looks to me like they are very up-front about how iffy some of this stuff is. So what's the problem? The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence. ... [however] we’ve found that there are a number of evidence-backed steps that anyone can take to become more productive and successful in their career... So we’ve gathered up all the best advice we’ve found over our last five years of research. In many cases, the evidence isn’t as strong as we’d like. Rather, it’s the best we’re aware of. We’ve tried to come to an all-considered view of what makes sense to try
  • Aeolun 10y ago
    Even if you are up front about how iffy your stuff is. You cannot just call out 'self-help advice with barely any evidence' and then repeat said advice without batting your eyes. I was hoping to see some actual evidence, but instead I found product advertisements and cheap motivational shit.
• jordanb 10y ago
  ... a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics.