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> On the other hand - or so they say - you're free, and if you don't like your job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming

• jarin 16y ago
  Also, take a look at the jobs he's listed as doing. That's not the career path of someone who has any direction or ambition, it's the career path of someone who takes whatever job comes along because he's out of money and desperate. I know, because I used to be that guy. My early career path looks like this: work at dad's restaurant, work at mom's jewelry store, temp agency, Cutco salesman, furniture assembler, temp agency, retail salesman in the mall, ear piercer, retail salesman in the mall. Then I finally got my act together (thanks to a not-entirely-honest-but-still-greatly-appreciated recruiter) and went Navy, freelance IT, freelance programmer, salaried programmer, freelance programmer, published iOS app, entrepreneur.
  • lionhearted 16y ago
    I've been out of money and desperate at various times. It sucks. But if you point the blame only outwards, you're very likely to remain broke and desperate. Own everything. Take all responsibility for everything that happens to you, even if it wasn't your fault. This leads to some instant satisfaction in terms of feeling more in control of your life. And long term, you do a hell of a lot better. I try to own everything, even if it wasn't my fault. Especially if it wasn't my fault.
    • jarin 16y ago
      Exactly, the moment when you realize that 99% of bad things that happen to you or success you're NOT getting are directly or indirectly the result of you putting yourself in that situation is the moment you become free.
    • Psyonic 16y ago
      Including the death and/or injuries of loved ones? i.e. you were driving, got T-boned, now your sister can't walk? I know people that's happened to, and they tend to "own it," and I'm not sure that's healthy,
    • z0r 16y ago
      Blame the poor for being poor?
    • momotomo 16y ago
      Have you ever read up on ILOC and ELOC? I'm not sure if it's just pop psych but I found it a good example to explain to people the importance of owning your life and outcomes. Basically people with a high internal locus of control drive change and own the outcomes (good or bad). People with an external locus of control accept change and blame external factors for the outcomes. Distinct difference in the happiness / satisfaction between the groups, if I recall correctly.
    • Psyonic 16y ago
      Apparently you're choosing not to answer me - which is fine - but just know that I wasn't trolling. I was honestly curious how far you take that attitude.
  • grammaton 16y ago
    "That's not the career path of someone who has any direction or ambition" This is essentially a veiled ad-hominem attack. You don't know the author's motivations or reasons for taking these jobs. You can't a priori assume that he took these jobs because he's lazy and unmotivated.
    • stonemetal 16y ago
      This is a straw man attack. Lack of direction, and ambition doesn't mean lazy or unmotivated. His job choices show lack of direction, with the random job walk he has done so far he certainly isn't moving in one direction. Same with ambition there doesn't seem to be any greatness seeking in his job selection.
      • grammaton 16y ago
        Again - you don't know what his internal process was for picking these jobs. You can't mind read and impute motivations for his selections. And no, it's not a strawman. Lack of direction, lack of ambition, lazy, unmotivated. See how they all go together?
        • stonemetal 16y ago
          Lazy and unmotivated are about his internal state, which you correctly point out we don't know. Lack of direction and ambition are observations of exterior actions. He is not moving in a direction, so we can say he lacks direction. He doesn't seek to be great or even good at anything so he lacks ambition. In making those two observations we have not ascribed any reason why he lacks ambition or direction. So complaining about people not knowing his motivations when we are talking about his actions not his motivations, is in fact a straw man.
          • zasz 16y ago
            Ambition is a personality trait, just like laziness and motivation. Your definition of the word is hella nonstandard. You can have internal ambition without there being a noticeable external effect, due to things like lack of opportunity, poor health, children, ignorance about what opportunities are present, and so on and so forth.
  • zasz 16y ago
    The author does have ambition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura He's a successful author and columnist. Hopefully, this now gives him the right to say a lot of low-paying jobs are shitty ones that barely treat you as a human being, and not everyone is able to work their way through them, despite how much fortitude they may otherwise have. This thread is full of ridiculous ad hominems. I don't think your comment even makes any sense. So you both used to work a string of dead-end jobs. While you're willing to note that you, yourself, ended up becoming an entrepreneur, you're not willing to grant this author the same possibility that perhaps he simply started out with a poor lot in life like yourself, and ended up also working his way up.
• stewbrew 16y ago
  > He overlooks some basic things - like that you can work part time, freelance, or save up your money and then not work for a few years. It seems the authors works as a novelist/writer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura. He probably didn't overlooked this exit strategy.
• jonnathanson 16y ago
  Yes. It takes effort, and it also takes balls (for lack of a more gender-neutral and appropriate word). If you want to get out of the drudgery and soul-hemorrage of the rat race, then you need to be prepared for the risk. Most people aren't. They do the mental math, figure that they need the salary or the stability or the medical coverage too much to risk it, and they take the blue pill. They resign themselves to their fates. And that's fine. It's a respectable and probably smart choice for most people, but it's a choice nonetheless. People shouldn't lose sight of that fact.
  • rgraham 16y ago
    Courage, bravery, bravado, boldness, gusto, audacity, pluck, fearlessness, risk-tolerance, temerity, tenacity, fortitude, nerve, or stoutheartedness work for you? It is indeed a choice. The consequences of reversing that choice get much more complex as you gain responsibilities in life. Ultimately, however, your life is on you. No one else can care like you do.
    • jonnathanson 16y ago
      Yes, though as a corollary, we need to remember that the "accumulation of responsibilities" is composed largely (though not solely) of the accumulation of a set of outcomes from a set of prior choices.
      • pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        >we need to remember that the "accumulation of responsibilities" is composed largely (though not solely) of the accumulation of a set of outcomes from a set of prior choices Our primary responsibility, if it is really one, is to care for ourselves; we have no choice but to take it. One of the main responsibilities we accumulate is the responsibility to care for ageing relatives. There are other major responsibilities - care for environment, for society - that are not born out of our prior choices (though our ability to handle those responsibilities is greatly affected by our past choices).
  • grammaton 16y ago
• hendler 16y ago
  The suffering is real. I agree the tone is defeatist, but I don't blame the author or hold resentment for the expression of the suffering. Poverty is a learned, psychological problem. Escaping the trap is possible, but not easy for most. The disease of poverty can cured with education and liberty, many believe. Where education and liberty fail, poverty brings us all down and holds us all back from our potential. Poverty isn't just for the poor. A significant portion of the wealthy also have a poverty of mind and perpetuate poverty by not investing in the future.
  • pnathan 16y ago
    I think you are redefining poverty here.
• cookiecaper 16y ago
  For the record, this was written in 1990, when low-cost startups like web sites were pretty difficult to conceptualize. Back then, there was very little you could do, outside of generic consulting, that didn't have a huge bootstrapping cost, making credit ratings much more important as you had to get a loan or an investment to get anything done. The internet has changed much of that now.
  • grammaton 16y ago
    Exactly. Most of the respondents to this thread don't seem to realize that we occupy a very unusual and richly privileged period of history - or for that matter, a very privileged position by dint of being fortunate enough to work in an industry that does allow it's workers a very high degree of autonomy if they choose that for themselves. Even then, it's still very hard and risky work.
    • Tycho 16y ago
      The question is why do we currently occupy this very rich and priveleged perioud of history - because we took Michael Ventura's advice 20 years ago and abandoned capitalism?
      • grammaton 16y ago
        That brings us to the follow up question of, if a small number of people are privileged during a small part of history, does that mean that the rest of it - filled as it was with problems and exploitation - is no longer a problem, and the critiques are no longer valid? Just because capitalism works some of the time for a few of the people, doesn't mean that it's above criticism, and has no problems. Since the majority of folks on HN have benefited from capitalism, it's not surprising that they are not as open to hearing criticisms of it.
        • Tycho 16y ago
          The way you phrased the initial objection, made it sound like our current state (whereby anybody with internet access can launch a webapp with global reach for practically nothing) is some sort of insignificant fluke rather than part of a trend of continual improvement.
• pygy_ 16y ago
  You're attacking the messenger, but you fail to address his core argument which boils down to Marx's criticism of capitalism (the fact that workers don't own the production means is unfair). "Just start your business" as a mean to all ends doesn't scale. Your last paragraph also seems to ignore that, for some people, just getting by takes (sometimes a lot of) effort. You may be clueless at some key point in your life, make a bad decision and get caught in inextricable situations. The difference between left- and right-wing views on economy boil down IMO to ethics. Both sides agree on the fact that the world is unfair, but they differ on how to address the problem. From the extremes, the left promotes forced altruism, which has historically been proven not to work so well; whereas the right promotes egoism (relying Adam Smith's Noodly Appendage to shelter itself from remorse), which, with the ever growing rift between the very rich and the rest of the world is currently coming to its own absurd conclusion.
  • lionhearted 16y ago
    > You're attacking the messenger, but you fail to address his core argument I'm not attacking him. His message places a lot of blame externally. That leads to not looking for solutions and building a better life. Marxism isn't the solution. I've been to a lot of the Marxist/ex-Marxist countries, and they're all worse off than similar neighbors who didn't endure Marxism. But that's not the big point. The big point is that placing the blame externally kills off your ability to solve problems yourself.
    • pygy_ 16y ago
      > I'm not attacking him. His message places a lot of blame externally. True. It's probably a matter of seeing where form ends and where meaning begins (which is of course based on a false dichotomy :-). > The big point is that placing the blame externally kills off your ability to solve problems yourself. That's your big point (and I agree with you on that). His point is a reformulation of a key facet of Marx's analytical economic theory, with which I agree. I wouldn't however ever think of advocating any of Marx's proposed solutions, which took out the human nature out of the equation, for great disaster.
    • steveklabnik 16y ago
• moultano 16y ago
  I don't think you're giving this enough thought. Some traits are an emergent property of systems, and while it's technically correct to say that this is blaming "other people," it's not a useful idea. It's like getting mad that someone lied to you, and blaming their neurons. The system we're in has some undesirable traits, and it's useful to think about them and how they might be fixed. Unless you're suggesting that every person on earth should be an entrepreneur to be happy, I think it's worth thinking about how to make the rest of the opportunities more hospitable to a happy life.
  • lionhearted 16y ago
    > Some traits are an emergent property of systems, and while it's technically correct to say that this is blaming "other people," it's not a useful idea. This is exactly blaming other people, from the article - > It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. ... In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned. There's many ways to work full-time less than 50 weeks out of the year. Instead, the author chooses to point the blame outwards. The whole article is heavy on that external blame. It's bad, it closes your mind off to many, many possible solutions. There's definitely lots of problems with working full time for just a paycheck, but it's unhelpful to people to wrap that in such a defeatist externally-blaming way. That kills your mind off to finding solutions.
    • grammaton 16y ago
      Your point is well taken that it tends to deaden one to looking for solutions - but that does not, in any way shape or form, invalidate the author's arguments.
    • moultano 16y ago
      Step 2 is finding solutions. Step 1 is recognizing that there is a problem. This article (in my view) is aimed at step 1.
• grammaton 16y ago
  Good for you that you've been able to do well starting a business. Guess what? Your personal situation is not applicable to everyone - or, for that matter, even most people. "But working stiffs can't afford houses now, fewer communities are clean, none are safe, and your kid's prospects are worse." "Compare this to what my employer gets: If the company is successful, he (it's usually a he) gets a standard of living beyond my wildest dreams, including what I would consider fantastic protection for his family, and a world of access that I can only pitifully mimic by changing channels on my TV." These are legitimate observations, not mere complaining.
• A1kmm 16y ago
  I think the author intended the post to be a macroeconomic critique, with personal details given as analogies. Macroeconomic reasoning by analogy, especially personal ones, is not very rigorous, and can sound defeatist; the same article could perhaps be more rigorously written from a more academic perspective with statistics rather than personal analogies. However, there is a certain subset of HN who don't seem to get macroeconomics - every time anyone discusses it, people come up with microeconomic solutions that wouldn't scale.