4 ms·

As a reclusive person I will tell you a big part of it is not having financial security and therefore not having social status or good health. I don't have the

• deleted 4y ago
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• baja_blast 4y ago
  Yes but in this case you'd be sharing a meal with people who share your experience. They will understand your struggles since they are also struggling.
  • whitemary 4y ago
    This just shows how little you have actually thought about the matter. Another deprived person does not negate the deprivation. Two wrongs don't make a right. Ignoring the root of the problem is only postponing the solution.
    • vuln 4y ago
      I don’t know. It works for AA. Alcoholics understand other Alcoholics like no other. Having someone the same social status eating, fellowship, brainstorming, can be uplifting. At least that’s my experience.
      • MisterTea 4y ago
        > I don’t know. Correct. You did not factor in alcoholics who do not show up for AA meetings. Not all alcoholics are the same.
        • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
          > did not factor in alcoholics who do not show up for AA meeting A solution isn't bad because it's incomplete.
        • Aeolun 4y ago
          While that is true, how many alcoholics that ever went to a AA meeting regretted it? Certainly discussing my anxiety with other people that had the same issue gave me a great perspective.
        • vuln 4y ago
          > Correct. You did not factor in alcoholics who do not show up for AA meetings. Not all alcoholics are the same. I am an alcoholic that didn’t go to meetings. Now I do. So yes I do know both sides. Kindly find someone else to shit and punch down on, thanks.
          • MisterTea 4y ago
            > I am an alcoholic that didn’t go to meetings. Now I do. I'm glad it worked for you but no where did I shit on AA or going to AA. You and everyone else really got this all wrong. edit might as well postt he rest of this: I merely pointed out that there are those who DONT GO. My friends sister is dead at 45 from drinking. Went to AA once said it was a joke and never went back, tried therapy didn't keep up. Family friends step daughter died at 37 from organ failure from heavy constant drinking. She never had any desire to seek help as if on a suicide mission. Lord knows those families tried to get them help. (Never mind the locals at the bar I knew who drank themselves to death in their 50's/60's with their pension money. So excuse me if I pointed out that no, AA isn't or doesn't work for everyone. Many simply don't go for whatever reason. And I am intimately familiar with mental illness and addiction both personally and surrounded by it via family and friends. So don't think I misunderstand the op, you or your path's to recovery.
    • xeromal 4y ago
      Wouldn't deprived people have that in common. Seems like a good way to make friends.
• duxup 4y ago
  No doubt that plan wouldn't work for everyone, but maybe some.
• yobbo 4y ago
  This seems like the most realistic take. They are not voluntarily reclusive but rather ostracized/excluded for being failures/losers relative to the social standards of their societies. Subsidies don't seem so bad. (If done right, they'll have to figure that out.) Even if they don't solve the whole problem immediately.
  • 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    As long as we're sharing anecdotes... I won't speak for everybody, but I definitely am "voluntarily reclusive", so this measure would do absolutely nothing if I lived in South Korea. Zero fucks given about what the society thinks: I work remotely, live a comfortable life, and have no desire to see anyone. It's just how my brain is hardwired and has been that way forever, no amount of money would fix it (even if I wanted to).
    • soared 4y ago
      Softwired! I was the same for many many years but changed as I grew older. The mindset you have is not bad in any way, I enjoyed my life then just the same as I do now. The brain changes over time, so subsidies or other solutions could still have an impact.
  • dageshi 4y ago
    I would say the main issue is that these people have very bad self esteem problems coupled with being introverts and the modern online worlds ability to endlessly distract you. In the past, pre-internet most of these people couldn't live like this, they'd be forced out of their homes from boredom, but with the internet that's just no longer true. The only way to fix it is to fix peoples self esteem, but these are likely the last people in the world who'd willingly go to something like therapy, I can't imagine subsidies are really going to help.
• zvmaz 4y ago
  Maybe being temperamentally an introvert has little connection with social status, but you pointed to something I haven't thought about before: how low social status can lead to seclusion. I wonder if there's been studies on that.
  • throwaway22032 4y ago
    There are plenty of people with low status out there, though. I mean, for every percentile 1% of people are in it, right. It seems like more of a matching problem than anything else.
• safety1st 4y ago
  Yeah I don't think it's a good idea either. A person in the situation you describe unfortunately is also likely to have a bad self-image. There's no guarantee that a conversation with a stranger is going to go well for them. If the person they have dinner with reacts negatively in some way it may upset them a great deal and reinforce their negative self-beliefs. What they need is more money in the bank and perhaps access to counseling services. (That's the best I can come up with, at any rate.)
  • Tozen 4y ago
    More money doesn't mean self improvement or being better at handling the opposite sex, outside of "pay for play". It can simply mean more money to spend on one's hobbies, addictions, and vices.
• bluGill 4y ago
  You are reading Hacker News. While I don't know your personal situation, the odds are strongly in favor of your personally making at least 3 times the average person. which is to say you have a spending problem not an income problem. I get it, I like my toys and luxury as well, but I know a few people who are living and raising kids on less than the average income and they are not doing that bad in life.
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  • Shared404 4y ago
    HN is a free to access website, that anyone interested in tech can stumble across at any time and access with any personal budget (assuming they've landed an web capable device) I was in high school with a basically non-existent budget when I first found this site, I'd trust someone here who says "Yeah, I'm not financially stable" - seems like the average income here is no longer relevant at that point.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      I've been around long enough to know there are a lot of people who claim they are not financially stable despite making far more than average. I know one person who said "We are so poor the bank wouldn't give us a loan for a brand new Mustang so we had to pay cash". There are for sure poor people in the world, but most of them are not reading HN. When you are in high school or college you are financially secure (baring bad luck - an accident could cause significant brain damage at any time...) since we trust you will finish your education and get a job. We also trust that in high school your family is feeding you, and in college you can get plenty of student loans (too many really, but that is a different subject). You don't have a lot of money to work with, but is not financially insecure, just a known low point in life.
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  • ilaksh 4y ago
    Right, because there is no such thing as a technically skilled person on earth who does low paying contracts and knows about HN. I am trying to get the VMs feature of aidev.codes out (also a bit of a reskin) since hundreds of people signed up for the website builder and tried it but only three people were willing to pay a dollar or more and about one other submitted a bug report. Credit purchases currently disabled because it was mainly used by one guy to test credit cards. Also everyone seemed to want to build complex applications with backend code. So I ran out of money and couldn't really market it and decided to just focus on the ability to generate and host back end code on GPT-4 powered VMs. This is basically working in the dev version, but still some bugs and other things to do, and haven't been able to focus on it the last month (although making progress bit by bit) because I have been busy doing low paying contracts from Upwork and reddit to pay rent (I did not have time for an extended search to pick up a high paying contract and got these within days which I consider an achievement). So I built a program that automatically writes queries on the fly for an MS ADX database, and optionally will generate arbitrary graphs, based on a user question. And now another system that integrates Slack and document question answering with semantic search (using llamaindex/gpt-index). Both for $1000 or less and within one or two weeks. I believe that a competitive rate for these tasks would be more like ten times that much, in some markets. But for Upwork and reddit, it's closer to what I billed if you want to be able to pick something up fast. Also I would rather make these my own businesses if I was not desperate for the cash to pay rent/bills. All it takes to continue being poor is to start being poor and need to pick up work fast. Or just not have a friend to seed your startup. Or maybe my whole problem in life is just making ugly websites by hand instead of using a template. I actually think I am probably doing it wrong because I see people with less technical skill and integrity focusing on raising money instead of solving problems and having all of their needs easily met. At the moment I am just sort of praying that the guy from Reddit doesn't turn out to be a crook or something and actually pays me the rest of what he owes. Which I don't really think he is but he really should acknowledge messages faster on Slack.