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Doing what you love when the money won’t follow

• throwaway22032 4y ago
  I love not having a boss, so I spent ten years being a prole and working my arse off. Now I do what I want. Some people want to spend their 20s doing what they want. I didn't feel I had that luxury. I didn't feel that I could just "not have a boss" straight away.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  I got into computers back in the Before Times because I liked it reasonably well, and it promised a decent paying job. I never did it at home just for fun. I hardly ever read technical literature that wasn't connected to the job. That said, it wasn't usually drudgery, and quite often it was way fun. This also left time to learn piano, singing, and to visit 26 countries. If I'd done those things full time and waited for the money to follow, I'd still be waiting. Now I'm retired and writing, and definitely not expecting a lot of money to follow. (Some, anyway! I just got my year-to-date statement from Amazon.) I'm not a religious person, but I always think of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, and told: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (good thing I looked this up. I would have said "by the sweat of thy brow") We have to work. That's the human condition.
• r053bud 4y ago
  For me I'd love to be a Highschool teacher, but the pay is simply not there. It's hard for me to convince myself to take a huge pay cut from Software Engineering though. Huge bummer to me.
  • iguanayou 4y ago
    I taught high school for five years but have been a software engineer for the past ten. I'd love to teach again - but sadly that would mean going back to a one bedroom apartment in a not-great part of town. Where I'm at now, I have a nice place in the country and the means to pursue hobbies that I couldn't before.
  • selectodude 4y ago
    Chicago Public Schools are hiring, you'd pull in $90+K.
    • hirvi74 4y ago
      That's more than I make as a dev lol.
  • odessacubbage 4y ago
    have you ever considered providing mentorship opportunities to high schoolers? imo it is very possible to get the joy of teaching and passing on your knowledge & skills w/o being in the system.
• ffdreamff 4y ago
  What gets to me is how many talented developers at Google and Facebook are willing to take big salaries and turn a blind eye to the "meaning" of their work. I'm friends with such people. They are lovely humans. But I zone out when they talk about their work. I just don't care how fun the work is when the outputs of the company you work for I don't agree with.
  • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    What if their work is meaningful? What if ads are just a way to help small businesses reach customers? The idea that Google is doing some awful thing is cynical. Even if you dislike ads, Google Cloud is infra for developers and applications to help businesses/people do work. All good stuff.
    • ffdreamff 4y ago
      I am cynical. But exactly zero of my half dozen or so friends at Google or Facebook jobs are meaningful. They enable the machines. > What if ads are just a way to help small businesses reach customers? I see this argument all the time online. But never in person. I don't think people say it in person because they know they don't truly believe it justifies the rest of the stuff.
      • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        Meaningful to who? It's unlikely to be a good assumption - that what people say in person is what they really think and what they say from behind a fake name isn't. There are a number of things people truly believe and don't say in person because of the expected negative reaction. I use my real name online and I'm careful of what I say. You seem to have created a fake name an hour ago to say something that you probably believe, but don't want to risk offending someone - it's a rational thing to do.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        Maybe you just haven't met anyone who's worked on SMB ads?
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I do what I love, and there's no money at all. I'm fortunate, in that I was able to save up enough of a modest nest egg, so that it doesn't matter. I have skills that could make a lot of money. The problem is the way that the folks that pay me, treat me, and my work. People seem to take the fact that they pay money, to be carte blanche to treat the people they pay, like garbage. When I was younger, I could eat that s**t, but as I got older, I got crankier. Nowadays, I do very good work, for free, for folks that couldn't afford me. They can be a pain, but I can also walk away (or threaten to), and we can usually work through the rough bits.
  • balfirevic 4y ago
    > but I can also walk away (or threaten to) That's just as true when they're paying you.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Not to me. If I sign a contract, I consider myself bound to it. It's not as easy to walk away. I consider it a matter of Integrity.
      • jimz 4y ago
        (well, that and if it's legally binding, it's a matter of performance or damages)
        • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
          This is true. But I still strive to Do The Right Thing, even if I am not legally required to. I’m aware that it is considered a “quaint anachronism,” but there you have it…
• p0d 4y ago
  My view is explore what you are curious about. My curiosity led me to the last 25 years in IT and more recently IT in education. As a religious person I have wondered where this computing curiosity or desires of my heart came from. God or myself? Either way, I had no sense of loving computers in the beginning. I just wondered if I could add a bigger hard drive or how to make a website . The lack of curiosity I have witnessed down through the years has often surprised me.
• brundolf 4y ago
  Good advice I think part of the problem is that "what you love" is too coarse of a term; the author hinted at this but didn't really dig into it. I would break it down into at least three parts: 1. Something that's fun to you (the moment to moment lights up your brain) 2. Something that gives you esteem (feeling like you're good at something, and probably also having others validate that with praise and/or payment) 3. Something that gives you a sense of purpose in life (like you're contributing to something bigger than yourself- can be artistically, socially, etc) Combining those with: 4. Something that makes you money we have four different needs that can be met by the same or different activities. Finding three in a single activity is hard; finding all four in a single activity is nearly impossible. But one or two here, one or two there, is very doable (assuming time allows). I tend to think a person should aim for a primary job that fills two, or maybe three, because of how much of their time it takes up. But they should not hold out for a job that fills all four. What's important is to become aware of exactly what each of these needs looks like for you personally, and which activities do and don't fill each of them. Then you can plan and prioritize to try and fill the gaps in your life. PS: I've found that #3 tends to revolve around people other than yourself. That could mean moving them or bringing them joy through art/creativity, or raising children, being a community leader, doing charity, or even just building a product that directly makes people's lives better. The specifics depend on the person. But totally insular activities probably won't ever do it for #3; I think we've got something at the base of our monkey-brains that has an unchangeable need to be helpful to the tribe.
• angarg12 4y ago
  "Do what you love and money will follow" has genuinely wrecked many lives. I know too many people (some very close to me) that followed this mantra. What ensued was most often very low paying jobs, or long term unemployment. The "luckiest" ones were able to do a career switch later in life. But there is an opportunity cost, as well as great time and effort involved on starting from scratch at that point. Much greater advice is "do something that affords the lifestyle you want to have". This formula will be different for each one and will be a tension between work, money, and personal life. I know people who work jobs they don't love or hate, but pay enough to sustain their living expenses and support their hobbies.
  • reneherse 4y ago
    The equally naive "follow your bliss" or "follow your passion" was the common coming of age advice given by many middle and upper-middle class American baby boomers to their children.
    • VLM 4y ago
      It was not naïve, they grew up in a generational-scale labor shortage with low inflation and incredibly low costs of living and low energy costs. They had a minimum wage in a technical legalistic sense, but financial success was guaranteed in practice. Risk taking is safe if you're not able to fail. Nobody lives in that kind of paradise now. Was all squandered.
      • reneherse 4y ago
        I'm aware of, and agree with, the points you've so clearly articulated. But to my mind, being blissfully unaware of the context of one's material success is an example of naivety.
      • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
        Definitely seems like a couple of generations ago you could do basically anything (As long as you did something) and come out pretty decent financially.
• rikroots 4y ago
  The key takeaway I got from the article was a word I've not come across before: avocation - an activity that someone engages in as a hobby outside their main occupation. I've known of the concept since before I started work[1], but it never occurred to me that there would be an English word for the concept. Which, as I am supposed to be a poet, is a bit embarrassing. Talking about poets, it's interesting that there's not many full-time poets in the world; most poets need a paying job (often in academia) to cover the bills. I personally think this is a Good Thing as it helps give them (us) a perspective beyond the poetry scene, and the blank page, which helps ferment more enjoyable poems. [1] - A couple of weeks after starting my first full-time job I discovered I genuinely detest paid employment. For me, the day job really is just a way to fund the rest of my life where all the fun stuff happens.
  • RistrettoMike 4y ago
    That was my takeaway as well. The "hustle-mindset" of turning every interest, passion, and hobby into some sort of side-gig is so pervasive currently that the existence of the word that sums up essentially the opposite mentality surprised me. Happy to have found it.
    • hirvi74 4y ago
      I think this is a reflection of how financially insecure most individuals in modern society are/feel. I believe that if most people were in a better spot financially, then perhaps this desire to extract money from everything would decline.
  • wobbly_bush 4y ago
    > Talking about poets, it's interesting that there's not many full-time poets in the world; most poets need a paying job (often in academia) to cover the bills Why don't they release poems like songs? In South Asia, there are poetry concerts and it is a hit with the older generation who were exposed to more poetry before movie songs became mainstream.
    • rikroots 4y ago
• VLM 4y ago
  There seems no obvious reason that everything good would be profitable, as if profitability is an expression of goodness. But as long as you can fund the good stuff somehow, it'll be OK.
• uwagar 4y ago
  theres nothing wrong taking and using family money or inheritance if u can. put it to the best use. the other aspect that must be acknowledged (if not encouraged) not outright avoided is the idea of sacrificing yourself for the art. a bit like a suicide bomber. being an artist isnt about having a middle class income and lifestyle so you dont 'die penniless'...there is something more mystical that only an artist can bring to life for themselves and others.
• bilsbie 4y ago
  Do what you money and the love will follow.
• ProAm 4y ago
  This article reminds me of another quote, "Don't believe everything you read"
• eirikbakke 4y ago
  There's "overhead" in every profession: time spent in cars and airports, time spent in boring meetings, time spent writing grant proposals, time spent on the day job while auditioning, etc. If you can spend 20 hours per week doing the thing you love, year after year, you're doing well.
• nytesky 4y ago
  There’s a whole meme in blind about aerospace engineers earning peanuts. Not sure if there are too many wanna be astronauts or just the nature of finances when primary customer is the gov. Even SpaceX is supposed to pay only soso!
  • SnooSux 4y ago
    A bit of both according to a coworker who left that space. There are more Aerospace Engineers that want to build the greatest latest rockets than there are positions so they have to settle for lower pay. And working on planes is a lot of contract work so the job situation isn't ideal. Picking a boring field is definitely a path to job stability.
• deleted 4y ago
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• otikik 4y ago
  I wanted to make video games. As an industry, video games suck, for a developer. No life-work balance, sudden firings, etc. Went for a web development instead. I program games as a hobby, and have some open source libraries out. A family, a house, interesting challenges. I sometimes wonder, yes. I hug my son and see what I have built so far.
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  • DeltaCoast 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing! I wanted to do the same, went to school for it, but it seemed like my passion would be exploited and I opted to design traditional software instead. So far so good! Care to share your libraries?
    • otikik 4y ago
      My libraries were originally made in Lua in order for me to better work with and learn the LÖVE framework. * inspect.lua [1] is the most popular one. It transforms any Lua value (including deeply nested tables) into human-readable strings. It is very useful for debugging all kinds of Lua projects, not just games. It is a partial reason why I got my current web dev job at Kong. * middleclass [2] is somewhat popular amongst people coming into Lua from OOP languages. I don't use it myself anymore and consider it a bit of a "clutch". Still, it has helped a lot of people. * bump.lua [3] is a box-based collision detection and resolution library. The later part has some known bugs I never figured out. Still has been used by some people to do some fun stuff. * gamera.lua [4] is a minimalist camera-system for LÖVE. * anim8 [5] is an animation library for LÖVE There's many other projects on my github profile. I must warn you that they are all in several degrees of disrepair, I pretty much abandoned all of my open source efforts when my first child was born. Ran out of free time and energy. These days, when I want to scratch my game-making itch, I fire up PICO-8, an even more minimalistic gamedev environment than LÖVE. I find the limitations it imposes refreshing. It also means that I cannot use most of my old libraries. Which is fine. [1] https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua https://github.com/kikito/inspect.lua [2] https://github.com/kikito/middleclass https://github.com/kikito/middleclass [3] https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua [4] https://github.com/kikito/gamera.lua https://github.com/kikito/gamera.lua [5] https://github.com/kikito/anim8 https://github.com/kikito/anim8
• kerblang 4y ago
  There is something to be said for loving what you do - which is to say, your job might be inglorious to some, but if it can be done well or badly, why not do it well? And then unfortunately the answer is, "Because I'll get fired for doing it well." Because yeah you work for people who hate everything they do and have contempt for everyone doing it. But it is possible to love being an accountant, a janitor, and then some, if you're permitted to treat that job as something meaningful rather than hateful. We've been taught to be angry that we aren't living out some fantasy and hate everything around us. Go ahead, call me gullible...
• grammers 4y ago
  Passion can keep you going, but at the end of the day bills must be paid.
• esel2k 4y ago
  There are a few books around that topic. I did read the Cal Newport - "So good they can't ignore you" where the summary says: Skills trumps passion and following you passion is a bad advice. I did follow that book for the last 5-10 years of my career and can say, I did double my salary and have now a life where I can easily afford big holidays, not worry about any car or health issues/breakdowns and put money on the side. But deep down I truly regret not turning my career in the middle to something closer to what I wanted to do. Today I have some small regrets not having followed a bit more the "passion"-things mid-career or trying to combine them and not always focus on money and climbing the ladder... One better advice is: If you want a satisfying career, ask yourself: What activities do I keep returning to, even though they are challenging? (check this HBR article: https://hbr.org/2020/11/what-you-should-follow-instead-of-your-passion https://hbr.org/2020/11/what-you-should-follow-instead-of-yo...)
  • senko 4y ago
    > Skills trumps passion and following you passion is a bad advice. It's hard to get really skilled at something if you're not passionate about it.
• ffhhj 4y ago
  Having worked from games to augmented reality, web, automation and AI, I think the advice should be: do what you love and make money from those skills you get on the road
• animitronix 4y ago
  Maybe it's native, but my first reaction is "find something else you love that does make money"
• bloomingeek 4y ago
  This can also apply to going to college. I know several people who went to college, mounted up a healthy college dept, and ended up going into the trades to make enough money to eat and pay the dept. As hard as it is to say, young people have to stop listening to their parents or others who will advise/force/scare them into a decision that will financially hurt them for a long time.
• QuantumGood 4y ago
  Generally, to "do what you love" successfully for money, you need people, management, planning, self-development and marketing skills. And you generally need to be quite exceptional in at least one of these areas. Most of us can make smarter decisions, get more sleep, be more efficient doing both what we don't want to do and do want to do. This is self-development. Without it, your productivity will be too low to make much money. Many of the best opportunities to be self-directed (which is a lot of what people "love") are in small business, where marketing dominates.
• oifjsidjf 4y ago
  1) Figure out something that you are good at but don't like and make plan how to levarage that in the best way to become financialy indepenend (aka rich) from that. 2) Now you can do what you want. For the average Joe this means that we'll be spending a lot of time outside of work working on 1). There is no other way for those of us from non-rich families: we have to wisely sacrifice free time and convert that free time into a non-linear $$$ return in the most practical way possible.
• itsmemattchung 4y ago
  Instead of following the notorious "do what you love and money will follow" advice, the author suggests instead to: > And so, the advice I would give to young people is this: structure your life so that you have the time and money to do what you love. That’s not easy to do by any means, but it is a much more realistic goal. I often tell people that when I first entered the tech industry many moons ago, I wasn't chasing the money. I simply loved working with computers. And it just so happens that working in tech is lucrative. But I do wonder, fast forward 15 years later, if I would've stuck around if the field wasn't as booming. I wonder if I tricked myself into believing that working in tech is really my passion ...
  • baxtr 4y ago
    Don’t be hard on yourself. Things with traction are usually interesting per se.
  • jdbernard 4y ago
    I have found myself in a similar position for most of my career. I also got into for the love of working with code. But I've stayed in the industry largely because it enables me to provide a comfortable lifestyle for my family. I am still passionate about writing software, but the software I like to write doesn't pay the bills. It's avocational. The tech industry afforded my family the lifestyle I desire, but it didn't really ignite my passion, it was just lucrative. I've since shifted into management. I'm finding new fulfillment in creating the kinds of teams I wish I had as an IC, that lets individuals work in ways they find fulfilling.
  • bradlys 4y ago
    Broke: “figure out your passion and make that your job” Woke: “get a lucrative career and find time to do your passions on the side” Bespoke: “find a lucrative profession and gaslight yourself into thinking you loved it all along” I know what I liked originally about computers was gaming, modding, hacking, and building them. I didn’t have a huge interest in programming and I definitely didn’t have an interest in having shitty managers. Yet here I am - big head SV engineer.
  • moe091 4y ago
• anderspitman 4y ago
  I think doing what you love (for work) is overrated. It's more important to do something that you think is meaningful.
  • colinsane 4y ago
    does this reframing do anything to solve the underlying dichotomy? few people, i venture, can truly find meaning in the present business environment. maybe it makes it easier to justify work at a non-profit, if the work is menial but meaningfully impactful.
  • davidjfelix 4y ago
    Sounds like you might love doing meaningful work.
• Jiro 4y ago
  If something is so much fun that you'd be willing to do it without getting paid, other people probably will do it without getting paid, which means that nobody's going to pay you for it.
  • Cupertino95014 4y ago
    Very well and succinctly stated. Go to any un-juried street art fair, and see all the mediocre art being offered by people with no outstanding talent. They probably love making their art, and not only would they do it without getting paid, they actually are doing it without getting paid.
  • ElevenLathe 4y ago
    The other strategy is to have a rare skill or set of skills such that, even if lots of other people will do it for free and therefore underbid you, you can still find buyers despite your higher (non-zero) price tag.
  • otikik 4y ago
    Or they could unionize
• plutonorm 4y ago
  I very nearly looked for the most dead end, brain dead job possible when I was in my mid 20s. The plan was to do something that enabled me to just think, which is my passion really. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd followed through. Would I have been happier, would I have been more productive for society or less? Maybe one of the hundreds of projects I don't have the energy to complete would have been completed and born fruit. In this path of life I feel like a tree that is continually bearing fruit, only to have it fall to the floor and rot unused. If I'm honest I think society would be better to let those with the disposition to dream and build without need for employment. Society as a whole would be better to allow those whose disposition forces them to continually create, to do just that, create. To be called to something is a gift, to be denied your calling creates a wound deep within the soul.
  • fnovd 4y ago
    Employment is an abstraction of resource-gathering. Every living being must gather resources to survive. Modern society does not enforce employment; employment is the manifestation of resource-gathering in modern society. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth is an incredibly popular lifestyle aesthetic. It's incumbent upon you to discover how to live that life while providing value to society, and if you cannot, then there exist some truths that others already discovered which are still foreign to your understanding. It's OK to think for your own intrinsic enjoyment, but if you aren't able to match the baseline of other successful thinkers then what is the utility to society of endowing you with what ultimately amounts to unlimited leisure time? Pontification is a perfectly acceptable hobby.
    • SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      Brandon Sanderson did much of his early work while employed as a night security guard. If he hadn't had the time to write those early books, he might never have been paid enough for writing to write full time. That kind of 'growth hack' can make sense in some circumstances.
    • plutonorm 4y ago
• _chu1 4y ago
  My generation (I am 14) might need something hammered into their heads. Just drawing pictures or making mediocre music isn't gonna bring you a lot of success or money, either get better or find a way to monetize it. But doing something you don't care for and making it your life kind of makes you into a slave in a way.
  • fnovd 4y ago
    The beauty and tragedy of our culture is the ability to leverage your future for a moonshot. It enables some real treasures to be discovered who can share their creations with the world, but each comes with the invisible cost of hundreds and thousands of failures who must "settle" for an average life. The success of the fortunate comes in no small part out of the investment of time, energy, and money from the failures. Young people are the worst at risk-assessment and at thinking through long-term costs, so most will happily alter the shape of their 99%-probability future if it improves the shape of their 1%-future. Dreams are powerful. You can do something you don't care for without making it your life.
    • ricksunny 4y ago
      Twelve years ago I wrote a blog post on exactly that concept of people going after optional disproportionally large gains, where everyone else only see the survivorship bias: "I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike. So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . ." https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.html https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.h... (There's context provided in the post). I probably have some interim updated thoughts about this twelve years on, but nothing conclusive.
• adolph 4y ago
  Ikigai is an excellent conceptual framework. I think something that many people tacitly work it out for themselves. For those not reading the article, please do click through for the Venn diagram of: * What you love * What you are good at * What pays well * What the world needs Each of these are somewhat independent factors and Ikigai is at the intersection of all four. "According to psychologist Katsuya Inoue, ikigai is a concept consisting of two aspects: "sources or objects that bring value or meaning to life" and "a feeling that one's life has value or meaning because of the existence of its source or object"." [0] In that I think Ikigai acts as a method for fumbling towards the higher bits of Maslow's hierarchy to self-actualization. [1] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
• throwaway13337 4y ago
  People love doing things that they think they are good at and get respect for. It just so happens that our culture over-values things that are not aligned with contributing to a better society right now. Someone identifying as a musician will get more accolades from one's peers than a plumber and therefore feel that their passion is in the music. We require a culture shift wherein we start to see, in a deep way, the value in the hard work of trying to make things better in the small, humble ways we are able to do ourselves. It is our values that are at fault. Maybe this new generative AI will help us re-align our values by showing that art regurgitation is not a defining characteristic of what makes us human and therefore virtuous. Maybe what makes us human are the smart applications of insight in ways that improve the lives of those around us.
  • gort19 4y ago
    > Someone identifying as a musician will get more accolades from one's peers than a plumber and therefore feel that their passion is in the music. Identifying as a musician won’t get you accolades. Playing music that people enjoy will. A smart insight is that music improves people’s lives even under materially poor conditions. This is why for example, black slaves in America originated many of the most beloved musical styles.
  • ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
    > Someone identifying as a musician will get more accolades from one's peers than a plumber and therefore feel that their passion is in the music. "Things musicians would never say"
  • AlbertCory 4y ago
    If you're a mediocre musician whom only your friends and relatives come to hear, you'll get a lot of accolades. The problem is, you'll suspect they're insincere. If you're a good plumber, you'll get a ton of genuine ones from people whose dire problems you've solved. I had a doctor once who said he sold his house to a plumber, who was trading up.
  • yunwal 4y ago
    My experience with friends that are making music professionally is that you will be brutally insulted by every idiot on the internet no matter how talented you are, and very rarely receive meaningful feedback - positive or negative. Most people make music for internal gratification.
• fluxinflex 4y ago
  For long time working in the tech industry was what I _loved_, heck I made my hobby (coding) to my job, what more could one want! But 20 years later and my love for coding was being drained by working in the ad-tech industry or building software to have people being replaced by a computer. Thankfully stepping out of the tech industry has given meaning to what I do. I now do what I love but for something meaningful - coding for my own projects, be they good, bad or indifferent, for me they are meaningful. An no the money does not follow but I can make others smile and occasional happy with what I do. I accept that I have to make the money last and sized down: no more fancy restaurants nor expensive electric toys; instead more supermarket queues and eating at home. But life is no longer the rinse and repeat of a 9to5 office job. > Rarely does a life leave time or energy for child-rearing, a paid job and a fulfilling avocation. I could not imagine living a world where this becomes the norm. The norm should be "It's rare for a person to have a shitty job, a mortgage, student debt to pay off and no financial possibility to have children until they are 65".
  • orev 4y ago
    >> Rarely does a life leave time or energy for child-rearing, a paid job and a fulfilling avocation. > I could not imagine living a world where this becomes the norm. The norm should be "It's rare for a person to have a shitty job, a mortgage, student debt to pay off and no financial possibility to have children until they are 65". This is the world you’re living in right now, it just sounds like you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t see it. For every worker who can sit home and code, there are at least hundreds of people doing menial jobs like harvesting crops, packing shipments, drilling for oil, fixing streets, etc. Most would probably describe those as “shitty jobs”, and sadly those jobs barely pay the rent.
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >menial jobs like [...] drilling for oil [...] and sadly those jobs barely pay the rent Out of all the jobs you listed, drilling for oil is the one that does not fit the bill, not by a long shot. In fact, in this market, it's by far the most lucrative you could have.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  To make decent money with a passion you often need to be in the top .1%. It's not like you need to be among the best in the world to make money working in fast food or law, compared to being a sprinter or chess player. Part of the problem is people will do hobbies for free, hence why they are hobbies and not jobs. Also, hobbies/passions do not create as much economic value compared to jobs. Coding the infrastructure that powers Amazon's store probably produces more economic value than learning how to play guitar, that is just the reality of the situation.
  • yunwal 4y ago
    > Coding the infrastructure that powers Amazon's store probably produces more economic value than learning how to play guitar, that is just the reality of the situation. This may be correct but I feel like there’s an incorrect assumption that producing economic value leads to receiving economic compensation. The amount you’re paid for your output doesn’t directly correlate to the amount of output, it correlates to how well you can hold that output hostage in exchange for money. A professional open-source developer on a major project like flask almost certainly produces way more value than a Google Junior engineer but still probably doesn’t get paid as much. I’d say the same goes for many guitarists