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I've had conversations about this with friends after choosing a similarly drastic change like that for myself. What stops them is a combination of inertia, mon

I've had conversations about this with friends after choosing a similarly drastic change like that for myself. What stops them is a combination of inertia, money and life change. It's not a trivial thing to quit your job and work somewhere else. One major factor is that you will be taking a large pay cut and might have to move. For those with mortgages and family staying with their less fulfilling jobs makes more sense. for many people their family comes first. Another issue is that the grass always appears greener. I do wonder what an engineer at Facebook would tell themselves, I think it might increase empathy with workers who are in places which are being labeled as morally bankrupt. I have some idea but that if they did share their thoughts they would get downvoted and hated for exposing themselves.

CalRobert 7y ago
I've mentioned it around here before, but I think this is the oft-unseen problem with artificially created scarcities (especially housing scarcities from NIMBYs). Say you've got 10 people. 5 of them want to do (noble but lower paying thing) and 5 and want to do (meh to possibly sketchy high-paying thing). If there are 10 homes, that's fine. Maybe the noble ones have simpler, less fancy houses, but they're still basically OK. They still have the basics of life. "I can do something good for humanity and forego some luxury" is something a lot of people might think. If there are 5 homes, then only the ones who do sketch work can have them. "I can do something good for humanity and be homeless" is something far fewer people think. This applies to other things where a person might want to voluntarily take in less income (couple with one person doing childcare, taking a career break to learn a new thing, etc.) and it's why creating these fake shortages sucks so much out of the human experience - you have to justify your endeavors in terms of the lost income, and how they'll affect your competitiveness.

CalRobert 7y ago

I've mentioned it around here before, but I think this is the oft-unseen problem with artificially created scarcities (especially housing scarcities from NIMBYs). Say you've got 10 people. 5 of them want to do (noble but lower paying thing) and 5 and want to do (meh to possibly sketchy high-paying thing). If there are 10 homes, that's fine. Maybe the noble ones have simpler, less fancy houses, but they're still basically OK. They still have the basics of life. "I can do something good for humanity and forego some luxury" is something a lot of people might think. If there are 5 homes, then only the ones who do sketch work can have them. "I can do something good for humanity and be homeless" is something far fewer people think. This applies to other things where a person might want to voluntarily take in less income (couple with one person doing childcare, taking a career break to learn a new thing, etc.) and it's why creating these fake shortages sucks so much out of the human experience - you have to justify your endeavors in terms of the lost income, and how they'll affect your competitiveness.