4 ms·

Millennial here as well, it's really excited to see our generation and the next generation reject "making money for someone else" as a way of finding meaning in

Millennial here as well, it's really excited to see our generation and the next generation reject "making money for someone else" as a way of finding meaning in life. I'm chewing on a lot of blog posts about this, regarding for example how the concept of "retirement" is terrifying. I was on a cruise recently and talking with a bunch of old people, and the subject often came up about how people were "finally taking the trips they always wanted to," or "finally exploring xyz hobby they never had time for." How terrifying is that, busting ass from your 20s to mid to late 50s, and then getting hopefully another 30 years to "enjoy life?" I mean I'm sure many people find enjoyment along the way but damn that just seems so depressing. Maybe it wasn't bad when that generation was working, I know many had a very nice quality of life for relatively less effort due to higher purchasing power and lower housing costs.

itsmemattchung 4y ago
> How terrifying is that, busting ass from your 20s to mid to late 50s Agreed. I'm all onboard with delayed gratification. I'm onboard with "putting in the work." But waiting (literally) decades before living it up... sounds totally backwards.
- 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  The flip side is there are people out there that do everything they want now. A couple people I know have been doing that for quite some time. They're getting older now - they've raided their retirement, they don't have much in terms of savings, no assets. Life is getting more difficult for them as they get older. My advice would be to find some balance. Go on some great adventures within reason. There's no reason to buckle down entirely until you're 60 but be smart about it.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
> I'm chewing on a lot of blog posts about this Care to share some of your favorite findings?
- komali2 4y ago
  Sorry I meant I'm writing blog posts about this. The topics are 1. Capitalism takes away your ability to be bored, at least mostly. You'll spend the majority of your time at work. You can be bored there, but not in a very productive way. Your boredom is a function of the company's failure to extract maximum value from you every hour you're there. My gf got laid off with a severance, her boredom is a gift, she can sit and be bored and in that way think about what her purpose is, why she likes being alive and what she wants to do with it. In that way capitalism steals purpose: your purpose day to day is to drive profits for a company. It's not explicitly evil or bad feeling when that happens, because the system rewards you in a million ways when you do tie your purpose to a company's profits. In what ways can people escape this to explore what their purpose might actually be? This isn't necessarily a new thought, I just wanted to explore it. 2. That "retirement" exists as a concept is terrifying for so many reasons, as listed above. It also creates a kind of cultural expectation of sacrificing the bulk of your life to "earn the right" to leisure... but some people are born into that right. That sucks. 3. Capitalism may have weaponized and pillaged the desire to be a part of something greater. Similar to 1, there's probably a natural human desire to "be a part of something greater" (heard in countless interviews of people that do otherwise kinda strange things like join violent militaries or participate in cults or allow themselves to be hazed to join frats). When you join a company, that desire is cannibalized to feed the needs of the corporation. Your day to day energy to spend on being a part of your local community is instead directed to the needs of a company who is possibly transnational and who even could be directly harming your community, by for example dumping trainfuls of harmful chemicals in your backyard. Corporations and corporate culture have been very good at directing the desire to have a common goal and be working together on something, but did they invent these techniques or just pillage them? Is project management something unique to capitalism? What happens if you get a big group of people who aren't having these energies directed by a profit minded project manager, what will they do in their own communities to find meaning? What happens when you take a highly skilled project manager and put them in a situation where there's no profit to be made, what kind of projects and organization will they dream up? This because I do a lot of anarchistic direct action and communal work and am always thinking about managing goals, projects, tasks, needs, and etc in situations where there's no profit motive. I'm also working on a blog post about how tf to get the 80 different web dev aligned emacs major modes to all respect a .editorconfig file and another one journaling my family's visit to Taiwan so realistically I'm spinning way too many plates....
moremetadata 4y ago
> busting ass from your 20s to mid to late 50s, and then getting hopefully another 30 years to "enjoy life?" Its just slavery which the older generations thought was appropriate, much like having a large family to look after you was a thing before family sizes came down. It sounds cliched, but have a bucket list of things you want to do and try to do some of them. Put yourself first and your job second because the days of businesses looking after their staff and a job for life is long gone as every recession demonstrates.
- DrThunder 4y ago
  How is working for money slavery? Do you believe food just magically appears on your plate, water cleans itself, your plumbing just happens to work, medical services operate autonomously etc.? The problem here, is you're an elitist. For you, your boring desk job is slavery so you want the freedom to go about doing whatever you want while the peasants provide you the means to continue being fat happy without providing anything back to society. You're speaking from a small minded subset of white collar society that has the inability to understand how society operates as a whole. What you want is to subject a certain class to "slavery" to support your endeavors.
  - komali2 4y ago
    > Do you believe food just magically appears on your plate, water cleans itself, your plumbing just happens to work, medical services operate autonomously etc Every politician I meet I ask the same question: what do we do when automation has driven the value of nearly all human labor down to pennies? None have an answer. Nobody that's a big fan of the current system has given me an answer other than "it'll never happen," but it seems inevitable to me. The usa already subsidizes food non productivity to maintain stable prices for agriculture. So why don't they just stop doing that so food does magically appear on my plate? Is maintaining broken market dynamics in every aspect of life so important that it justifies some going hungry, some working two jobs, all of us working 40 hours a week until we're 60?
    - DrThunder 4y ago
swader999 4y ago
A human life is barely the time it takes at a stop light when you consider we live for eternity. Learn how to love, don't try to gratify the ego.
autokad 4y ago
In their 20s and 30s, my siblings pursued their own interests and desires, but unfortunately, this approach did not lead to success. Now in their late 50s and early 60s, they find themselves lacking the necessary skills and experience to keep up with the rapidly changing job market. As a result, they are limited to unskilled labor, with no significant savings or retirement plans. Despite having pursued their dreams when they were younger, they are not particularly content. They constantly ask me for money now.
- agubelu 4y ago
  Then I would argue that it is a systemic issue that people who do "unskilled work" are not paid enough to be able to save money or access retirement plans (I assume you live in the US where there isn't a public pension system)
  - autokad 4y ago
    or ... there are consequences for never investing in yourself. if you treat work as work, that's all you will ever get out of it. a career is one of the most important things in a person's life and should not be taken as unimportant. I'm also perplexed about the people who say things like 'why should I make someone else rich'. can you imagine that in an interview? yeah hire me, but you better not be making a profit on me. you better break even or lose money or I'm out! you should WANT people to make money off your efforts.

itsmemattchung 4y ago

> How terrifying is that, busting ass from your 20s to mid to late 50s Agreed. I'm all onboard with delayed gratification. I'm onboard with "putting in the work." But waiting (literally) decades before living it up... sounds totally backwards.

4RealFreedom 4y ago
The flip side is there are people out there that do everything they want now. A couple people I know have been doing that for quite some time. They're getting older now - they've raided their retirement, they don't have much in terms of savings, no assets. Life is getting more difficult for them as they get older. My advice would be to find some balance. Go on some great adventures within reason. There's no reason to buckle down entirely until you're 60 but be smart about it.

itsmemattchung 4y ago

> I'm chewing on a lot of blog posts about this Care to share some of your favorite findings?

komali2 4y ago
Sorry I meant I'm writing blog posts about this. The topics are 1. Capitalism takes away your ability to be bored, at least mostly. You'll spend the majority of your time at work. You can be bored there, but not in a very productive way. Your boredom is a function of the company's failure to extract maximum value from you every hour you're there. My gf got laid off with a severance, her boredom is a gift, she can sit and be bored and in that way think about what her purpose is, why she likes being alive and what she wants to do with it. In that way capitalism steals purpose: your purpose day to day is to drive profits for a company. It's not explicitly evil or bad feeling when that happens, because the system rewards you in a million ways when you do tie your purpose to a company's profits. In what ways can people escape this to explore what their purpose might actually be? This isn't necessarily a new thought, I just wanted to explore it. 2. That "retirement" exists as a concept is terrifying for so many reasons, as listed above. It also creates a kind of cultural expectation of sacrificing the bulk of your life to "earn the right" to leisure... but some people are born into that right. That sucks. 3. Capitalism may have weaponized and pillaged the desire to be a part of something greater. Similar to 1, there's probably a natural human desire to "be a part of something greater" (heard in countless interviews of people that do otherwise kinda strange things like join violent militaries or participate in cults or allow themselves to be hazed to join frats). When you join a company, that desire is cannibalized to feed the needs of the corporation. Your day to day energy to spend on being a part of your local community is instead directed to the needs of a company who is possibly transnational and who even could be directly harming your community, by for example dumping trainfuls of harmful chemicals in your backyard. Corporations and corporate culture have been very good at directing the desire to have a common goal and be working together on something, but did they invent these techniques or just pillage them? Is project management something unique to capitalism? What happens if you get a big group of people who aren't having these energies directed by a profit minded project manager, what will they do in their own communities to find meaning? What happens when you take a highly skilled project manager and put them in a situation where there's no profit to be made, what kind of projects and organization will they dream up? This because I do a lot of anarchistic direct action and communal work and am always thinking about managing goals, projects, tasks, needs, and etc in situations where there's no profit motive. I'm also working on a blog post about how tf to get the 80 different web dev aligned emacs major modes to all respect a .editorconfig file and another one journaling my family's visit to Taiwan so realistically I'm spinning way too many plates....

moremetadata 4y ago

> busting ass from your 20s to mid to late 50s, and then getting hopefully another 30 years to "enjoy life?" Its just slavery which the older generations thought was appropriate, much like having a large family to look after you was a thing before family sizes came down. It sounds cliched, but have a bucket list of things you want to do and try to do some of them. Put yourself first and your job second because the days of businesses looking after their staff and a job for life is long gone as every recession demonstrates.

DrThunder 4y ago
How is working for money slavery? Do you believe food just magically appears on your plate, water cleans itself, your plumbing just happens to work, medical services operate autonomously etc.? The problem here, is you're an elitist. For you, your boring desk job is slavery so you want the freedom to go about doing whatever you want while the peasants provide you the means to continue being fat happy without providing anything back to society. You're speaking from a small minded subset of white collar society that has the inability to understand how society operates as a whole. What you want is to subject a certain class to "slavery" to support your endeavors.
- komali2 4y ago
  > Do you believe food just magically appears on your plate, water cleans itself, your plumbing just happens to work, medical services operate autonomously etc Every politician I meet I ask the same question: what do we do when automation has driven the value of nearly all human labor down to pennies? None have an answer. Nobody that's a big fan of the current system has given me an answer other than "it'll never happen," but it seems inevitable to me. The usa already subsidizes food non productivity to maintain stable prices for agriculture. So why don't they just stop doing that so food does magically appear on my plate? Is maintaining broken market dynamics in every aspect of life so important that it justifies some going hungry, some working two jobs, all of us working 40 hours a week until we're 60?
  - DrThunder 4y ago

swader999 4y ago

A human life is barely the time it takes at a stop light when you consider we live for eternity. Learn how to love, don't try to gratify the ego.

autokad 4y ago

In their 20s and 30s, my siblings pursued their own interests and desires, but unfortunately, this approach did not lead to success. Now in their late 50s and early 60s, they find themselves lacking the necessary skills and experience to keep up with the rapidly changing job market. As a result, they are limited to unskilled labor, with no significant savings or retirement plans. Despite having pursued their dreams when they were younger, they are not particularly content. They constantly ask me for money now.

agubelu 4y ago
Then I would argue that it is a systemic issue that people who do "unskilled work" are not paid enough to be able to save money or access retirement plans (I assume you live in the US where there isn't a public pension system)
- autokad 4y ago
  or ... there are consequences for never investing in yourself. if you treat work as work, that's all you will ever get out of it. a career is one of the most important things in a person's life and should not be taken as unimportant. I'm also perplexed about the people who say things like 'why should I make someone else rich'. can you imagine that in an interview? yeah hire me, but you better not be making a profit on me. you better break even or lose money or I'm out! you should WANT people to make money off your efforts.