12 ms·

You Don't Need More Resilience. You Need Friends. and Money

131 points by jackallis 3y ago

toomanyrichies 3y ago
https://archive.ph/Bhh2I https://archive.ph/Bhh2I
wins32767 3y ago
It's unfortunate that the article downplays resilience so much. It's entirely true that you can control your level of stress by making different choices, but for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it. The best way to learn is guided practice under stressful conditions, speaking from personal experience. Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Resilience is important, grit is important. I say this having been on a very dark path when I was holding my personal world up with very little support (so little we can round down). With that said, friends and resources are important and necessary. It is important to have someone you can call or text and say "I need help" and the cavalry is coming. Be that person to people in your life if you can be. I'm not able to fix society, but I'll take care of the people around me until death.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    Calvary is the hill on which Jesus was crucified. I think you wanted to use “Cavalry” in context. https://www.gingersoftware.com/english-online/spelling-book/confusing-words/calvary-cavalry https://www.gingersoftware.com/english-online/spelling-book/...
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Corrected, iphone autocorrect (strange choice for the robot keyboard), thank you! Also, TIL!
      - prewett 3y ago
        > strange choice for the robot keyboard There's probably a lot more Christians talking about Calvary than there are military historians talking about an obsolete horse unit. Although it does seem like if it's uncapitalized it's likely to be military horses and not geographical locations. I bet trying to optimize autocorrect is a fun challenge!
        aaaasmile 3y ago
        In italian "La vita è un calvario", in french "La vie est une calvaire" and in spanish "La vida es un calvario" they all mean "Life is an ordeal" or "Life is a torture". May be the context of the topic plays a role here much more that the geography location.
    - polytely 3y ago
      huh I thought it was Golgotha, but apparently Calvary is the Latin name for the place and Golgotha the Greek. funny that I've never heard of Calvary.
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  It's significantly easier to handle stressors when the stakes are lowered by friends and money. For example, it is so much less stressful to handle legal disputes (everything from traffic tickets to rough divorces to criminal cases) if you don't have to worry about how much your lawyer costs or who will cover your shifts at work etc. It is much less stressful to handle a cancer diagnosis when you can afford private medicine. And not to mention how super, duper, uber less stressful having an illness like diabetes is if you can afford insulin. Imagine how much more resilience a rape victim could have if they could afford therapy.
- spaniard89277 3y ago
  Stress is neccessary to grow and even to keep going, I'm with you in that. But I think the article is right in pointing out that there's too much focus into some inner force that makes you accomplish everything. This has been going for a while, and coupled with other factors, I don't think it's paying good dividends. I think that everyone paying attention can see the steep increase in depression and medication. It's not only the US, it's happening in Europe too. My impression is that we're removing people from their support networks, manufacturing lonely individuals, and eroding their financial float line through housing. I don't think mental thoughness or resilience can overcome this for too long, and many people is exposed to this stressors for many, many years, if not their entire life. Even Taleb, who is really tiresome talking about stress, recognizes that stress is only useful if it is more or less bounded.
  - kiba 3y ago
    As I find myself often saying: Why not do both? Improve your friendship network and improve resilience.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      Something really thrown into stark relief by becoming a parent is that “doing both” is often a lie. We only have time for so many things.
    - Arainach 3y ago
      Both cost time, which is finite and precious. Stress reduces the amount of time you have available - if all of your time not working is spent destressing, you're not much fun to be around, and that impact your ability to make and retain friends
      - fragmede 3y ago
        Find a hobby that you de-stress with others with so even though you're not fun at the beginning of the class/session, by the end of it you've screamed your frustration out and are pleasant to be around. Make friends at the end of this de-stressing event.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it And in that toolbox should be venting to a friend or taking a break for the evening or weekend and splurging on a nice dinner or small holiday. That’s the article’s point: it’s insufficient to insist on managing it all internally.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Resiliience is good, but it barely pays the bills. People don't get rich with resilience, but by charisma, family support, genetic lottery, connections, friends, and opportunities. Resilience and ingenuity are cool too, but there are tons of resilient and ingenius people that never make it. And there are extremely resilient single mothers working 2 jobs and making ends meet without complaining. But that doesn't get them any success.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit. It's one thing that we get the occasional natural disaster, financial crisis, or some war in some remote country. We can handle that, this has been the case throughout human history. But we just came out of a four-year pandemic (and hell, if you look at sewage monitoring, hospitals or half your colleagues being out sick, it still isn't over), after decades of wage stagnation, multiple crises, seriously escalating wars, exploding rents, masses of people living on the streets in the US, climate change is looming, autocrats are on the rise across the world - it's fucking enough already. Politicians aren't doing a thing to help us, no one is looking out for anybody else any more because no one has the mental/physical/time/financial resources to do so. We are in unprecedentedly bad times, and I can completely understand anybody saying "screw this, I'm out" and just going mental in one way or another. Some resort to drugs, some just break down completely, some off themselves, some off others - everyone reacts different in response to too much stress.
- nsagent 3y ago
  The article does not downplay resilience. It merely says that resilience has both internal and external components. That is, you can only get so far while just focusing on your personal ability to overcome adversity, but you'll do even better if you combine that with external support. To be honest, I'm not sure how that can be misconstrued on Hacker News, when people frequently focus on the power of groups working together (whether that's open source, corporations, or other organizations). It's clear that some of the most lauded organizations are ones that often support their members, especially in times of hardship. This comes from someone who is very much a proponent of perseverance. My first tattoo enshrines this Japanese proverb on my forearm where I can always see it: 七転び八起き Fall seven times, stand up eight
  - lioeters 3y ago
    The proverb is associated with a figure called Daruma, with a round physique that always gets up no matter how it's knocked down. It's cute and symbolic, popular in Japanese culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daruma_doll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daruma_doll
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  I don't see how it's downplaying anything, except in comparison to money and friends. Given that it's fairly obvious that almost all problems can be solved or seriously mitigated by money and friends, I think it's a fair conclusion to say that money and friends are strictly superior to (internal) resilience. I also think the example and conclusion they gave was perfect: little problems are much bigger when you don't have the tools available to effectively solve them, and those tools are money and friends, which are sources of external resilience. They're not saying internal resilience is bad; they're simply saying that not having to get to the point of needing to be internally resilient is strictly better. These all seem like fair statements that sound like they come from the department of "no shit, Sherlock," to me.
- QuantumGood 3y ago
  When I was younger, there were those who were commonly late or no shows, and their futures rarely went in a good direction. For myself I found I had to acquire quite a bit of resilience to reach average reliability. The youngest generations now see things like a non-fixed schedule as a lifestyle perk—and they're right—but I worry about how they can acquire resilience from this and other areas.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  I'm sure there are a lot of people out there suffering from lack of resilience, especially those who's goals are focused on inherently hard things... But there are so many graduates of the school of hard knocks giving straight up dangerous advice and people might want to be more careful.
anotherhue 3y ago
This sort of gaslighting is incredibly common. The resilience we need is against believing a word any company says. You're only ever one 'company reset' [0] [1] away from the kerb. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918643 1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=layoff&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
stanleykm 3y ago
Pretty galling that we have one of the most prominent capitalist cheerleaders out here telling us we need more friends and money when they have such an outsized influence on the reasons we have neither.
- patrickmcnamara 3y ago
  Could you explain what you mean?
  - wharvle 3y ago
    I'd suppose it's a reference to rich people having far more influence on public and economic policy than the working class, and those policies in turn having a substantial effect both on how people interact and who has money, especially when examined over a decades-long time horizon.
    - theGnuMe 3y ago
      True but the tools and approach is all there. Just have to community build and develop a super PAC.
  - stanleykm 3y ago
    I’ll do my best but I wont pretend to be the best person to talk about this. The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human. To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days. Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.
TriangleEdge 3y ago
I agree with the title, I don't think it matter how resilient you are if you have no friends and no money. The Veritasium YouTube channel debunked the fact that money doesn't make you happier (it does) and that there's a plateau (there isn't). I also learnt from Jordan Peterson that you only get positive emotion if you follow a goal. You can't follow a goal if you have no money. Anecdote: being poor is the most soul crushing thing that has happened to me. In my early 20s, I would go dancing sometimes and someone would approach me saying "you should buy me a drink" and I remember saying no because I had like 50$ total. Note, I was not blessed with loving parents. I don't know for sure, but I am willing to bet that people with more money have more friends with higher quality and deeper bonds then people with less money. I do think this plateaus however.
- redserk 3y ago
  Financial reasons or not, it is an entirely valid choice to decline someone's request for a drink.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    It's a valid choice, but so is theirs to not continue to interact with you.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Right, but as soperj said, the people you miss out on are the people who will dump you because you won't spend money on them. Missing out on them is likely to be a net win.
    - fhdkweig 3y ago
      That's the difference between a life-long friendship and a business transaction.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    It's still soul crushing. It's internalized in a whole different way. When you have two, you have two, when you have one, you have none, what is it? Options. When you don't have a dime you don't choose not to spend money, your brain never gets there, it's just a "no" and the "no" is because you are poor.
npilk 3y ago
Based on the headline, I expected this article to argue that success in business depends more on connections and resources than it does purely on resilience.
- worik 3y ago
  That's true too
throw__away7391 3y ago
[flagged]
- marssaxman 3y ago
  I am so sorry to hear that your life works that way, and I hope someday you find better friends.
- ragnot 3y ago
  I think people are downvoting you because of the way you delivered the message rather than the content of the message. As I've gotten older, I've realized it is actually more healthy to view professional contacts in this manner (but not necessarily family). It helps compartmentalize their behavior (which is intrinsically self-motivated) to just being "how the game is played".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- forward1 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    What is your take on philosophies which would encourage you instead to be more patient with people and anticipate their needing and insecurity? From that perspective, becoming a better man would mean becoming more patient, compassionate, and at ease with the way people typically are. I’m not saying I disagree. I find the contrast in views really interesting.
    - forward1 3y ago
      They are just that - philosophies. I live my life based on first-hand experience only, not the musings of a professor or even a poet. And I'm sorry to say it is as follows: not all people deserve compassion, nor patience. Most of the people I've come across in life are plainly stupid by choice, and a stupid person is the most dangerous kind. On the other hand, individuals with special needs, children and animals are mostly defenseless in this world and actually deserve our attention. I have focused my time and resources on helping them (versus the family and friends "in need") and this has proven to be more fulfilling, and I believe ultimately more selfless than my past self.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
I remember a conversation I had with my doctor once. She was talking about her son, and mused that she thought my disability had made me a much grittier and conscientious person than most of my peers. That's a nice sentiment, but something I noticed when I eventually managed to graduate college was that there was no substitute for a good safety net and parental support. I watched dumbfounded as some of my classmates went on to found or join risky startups during the great recession. For me, failure would have been catastrophic. I'd have likely wound up sleeping under a bridge. I was amazed they were so fearless! Only, I later learned the reason they were so fearless is they knew their parents would step in and pay for their living expenses while they got back on their feet. TLDR: Some folks can swing for the fences, take outsized risks, and reap the rewards, because failure is always an option.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  TLDR: money takes away the risk. When it's all upside, there is no risk, it's just a distribution of possible upsides.
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    Yep, and it's made me reconsider my conservative risk tolerance now that I'm finally financially independent. I'm not sure if I should 'swing for the fences' or 'take a knee and run out the clock'. Probably the latter. I'm not sure I'm hungry enough to put up with a startup in my 40's.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      according to statistics, many successful startups are by people in their 40s. ok, so if you are not hungry enough, that's fine, but i think being financially independent at 40 seems to be the best time to throw yourself into a startup. since you are already financially secure you don't have to overwork yourself, but you can take it a bit slower.
- DoubleDerper 3y ago
  Resilience: Stay strong when you're product launch isn't going well. Resilience: Stay strong when you're a working single mother struggling to pay rent and feed your kids. The techno-twitter teeth grinders would have you believe these are the same. They are not.
VirusNewbie 3y ago
I interviewed for a dream position at a huge tech co a few years ago . I cold applied after seeing the job ad in the "who is hiring" on HN. That alone felt like a big step, I had never done one of those grueling long interviews people talk about, and someone reached back out. I studied, I practiced coding fast, I did mock interviews, but I was still nervous as hell to actually try one with real stakes. I thought my resume was a perfect fit, an intersection of fairly niche technologies and skills that I actually had. I had to do multiple screening rounds, solve leetcode-esque problems. I made it to the onsite! My nerves were going crazy but, the first coding problem, I went right to work, my fingers were flying, and by the end of it I could see that my interviewer was more than pleased. He said I finished early and we could just chat about life at BigCo. The second round was similar, and the third round! Fourth round, not as great, but I didn't completely whiff on the question. And..........I got rejected. I was in the dumps for months. Maybe I wasn't cut out for big tech. I'm not smart enough. I don't have impressive credentials. But eventually I said fuck it, I'm going again. I applied to a few more jobs and.....started getting offers at top tier companies. The algorithmic thinking is hard, coding fast is hard, not letting my nerves get the best of me is hard, explaining my thought process took practice, but just having the resilience to go through the process after hard rejection was crucial. I had a job at the time, and part of me really wanted to just give up and say I was content with my gig at a small company. But I didn't give up. I hope I can pass on that trait to my son one day.
- asquabventured 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. The world needs more examples of perseverance leading to success. I think a lot of people think success should come without perseverance. Maybe it works that way for some people but it sure doesn't for me. Cheers
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
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oldpersonintx 3y ago
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korse 3y ago
I see a whole lot of people talking about net givers and net takers and how these dynamics affect the usefulness of a friend/acquaintance group. This is HN. Private bit torrent trackers anyone? The higher your seed-to-leech ratio in a small community, the more use the community will be to you. This applies directly to friend groups. If each person tries to seed the group with actions that benefit many but are trivial for them to accomplish based on personal stats, everyone benefits disproportionately to the individual effort invested. High ratios can then be tapped for uncommon and/or infrequent requests without compromising relationships.
rawgabbit 3y ago
The article is more insightful than the title lets on. The author said employees should quit your demanding job and employers should help their employees instead of paying lip service about inner strength. As for deeper changes, business self-help authors — who often make their real money not from selling books, but from paid speaking and consulting gigs at large companies — aren’t about to tell you to quit your draining job and take a (perhaps lower-paid) role at a less-demanding organization. Nor do most of them suggest policy changes that contribute to a more resilient workforce — such as paid sick days, parental leave or flexible staffing models — that cost companies money. It’s safer for their business model to keep emphasizing inner strength. And maybe, too, that message plays well with an audience that hates to admit there can be trade-offs.
sonorous_sub 3y ago
Chicken or egg?
kridsdale1 3y ago
Girls don’t like Boys; Girls like Cars and Money.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  Turns Out Boys Also Like Cars And Money
iteratethis 3y ago
Corporations love the tale of resilience. You'll have evil corp pushing their employees to the max. Then HR sends an email "we care about your mental health", which includes a link to an e-course on meditation. They do not care about your mental health because they don't spent a second addressing the root cause of the overload of stress. All of society now has this fatalism built in. The believe that we can fix problems and improve life for all is largely gone. Instead, the energy is that we accept that the future is bleak, make no effort to change it, expect things to perpetually get even worse, and somehow at an individual level try to find some marginal happiness within this reality we see as a given. I'm personally not as pessimistic as the above suggests, just saying this is the culture.
Paullittle12345 3y ago
[flagged]

131 points by jackallis 3y ago

https://archive.ph/Bhh2I https://archive.ph/Bhh2I

It's unfortunate that the article downplays resilience so much. It's entirely true that you can control your level of stress by making different choices, but for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it. The best way to learn is guided practice under stressful conditions, speaking from personal experience. Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Resilience is important, grit is important. I say this having been on a very dark path when I was holding my personal world up with very little support (so little we can round down). With that said, friends and resources are important and necessary. It is important to have someone you can call or text and say "I need help" and the cavalry is coming. Be that person to people in your life if you can be. I'm not able to fix society, but I'll take care of the people around me until death.
- Sai_ 3y ago
  Calvary is the hill on which Jesus was crucified. I think you wanted to use “Cavalry” in context. https://www.gingersoftware.com/english-online/spelling-book/confusing-words/calvary-cavalry https://www.gingersoftware.com/english-online/spelling-book/...
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Corrected, iphone autocorrect (strange choice for the robot keyboard), thank you! Also, TIL!
    - prewett 3y ago
      > strange choice for the robot keyboard There's probably a lot more Christians talking about Calvary than there are military historians talking about an obsolete horse unit. Although it does seem like if it's uncapitalized it's likely to be military horses and not geographical locations. I bet trying to optimize autocorrect is a fun challenge!
      - aaaasmile 3y ago
        In italian "La vita è un calvario", in french "La vie est une calvaire" and in spanish "La vida es un calvario" they all mean "Life is an ordeal" or "Life is a torture". May be the context of the topic plays a role here much more that the geography location.
  - polytely 3y ago
    huh I thought it was Golgotha, but apparently Calvary is the Latin name for the place and Golgotha the Greek. funny that I've never heard of Calvary.
KittenInABox 3y ago
It's significantly easier to handle stressors when the stakes are lowered by friends and money. For example, it is so much less stressful to handle legal disputes (everything from traffic tickets to rough divorces to criminal cases) if you don't have to worry about how much your lawyer costs or who will cover your shifts at work etc. It is much less stressful to handle a cancer diagnosis when you can afford private medicine. And not to mention how super, duper, uber less stressful having an illness like diabetes is if you can afford insulin. Imagine how much more resilience a rape victim could have if they could afford therapy.
spaniard89277 3y ago
Stress is neccessary to grow and even to keep going, I'm with you in that. But I think the article is right in pointing out that there's too much focus into some inner force that makes you accomplish everything. This has been going for a while, and coupled with other factors, I don't think it's paying good dividends. I think that everyone paying attention can see the steep increase in depression and medication. It's not only the US, it's happening in Europe too. My impression is that we're removing people from their support networks, manufacturing lonely individuals, and eroding their financial float line through housing. I don't think mental thoughness or resilience can overcome this for too long, and many people is exposed to this stressors for many, many years, if not their entire life. Even Taleb, who is really tiresome talking about stress, recognizes that stress is only useful if it is more or less bounded.
- kiba 3y ago
  As I find myself often saying: Why not do both? Improve your friendship network and improve resilience.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Something really thrown into stark relief by becoming a parent is that “doing both” is often a lie. We only have time for so many things.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    Both cost time, which is finite and precious. Stress reduces the amount of time you have available - if all of your time not working is spent destressing, you're not much fun to be around, and that impact your ability to make and retain friends
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Find a hobby that you de-stress with others with so even though you're not fun at the beginning of the class/session, by the end of it you've screamed your frustration out and are pleasant to be around. Make friends at the end of this de-stressing event.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it And in that toolbox should be venting to a friend or taking a break for the evening or weekend and splurging on a nice dinner or small holiday. That’s the article’s point: it’s insufficient to insist on managing it all internally.
coldtea 3y ago
Resiliience is good, but it barely pays the bills. People don't get rich with resilience, but by charisma, family support, genetic lottery, connections, friends, and opportunities. Resilience and ingenuity are cool too, but there are tons of resilient and ingenius people that never make it. And there are extremely resilient single mothers working 2 jobs and making ends meet without complaining. But that doesn't get them any success.
mschuster91 3y ago
> but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit. It's one thing that we get the occasional natural disaster, financial crisis, or some war in some remote country. We can handle that, this has been the case throughout human history. But we just came out of a four-year pandemic (and hell, if you look at sewage monitoring, hospitals or half your colleagues being out sick, it still isn't over), after decades of wage stagnation, multiple crises, seriously escalating wars, exploding rents, masses of people living on the streets in the US, climate change is looming, autocrats are on the rise across the world - it's fucking enough already. Politicians aren't doing a thing to help us, no one is looking out for anybody else any more because no one has the mental/physical/time/financial resources to do so. We are in unprecedentedly bad times, and I can completely understand anybody saying "screw this, I'm out" and just going mental in one way or another. Some resort to drugs, some just break down completely, some off themselves, some off others - everyone reacts different in response to too much stress.
nsagent 3y ago
The article does not downplay resilience. It merely says that resilience has both internal and external components. That is, you can only get so far while just focusing on your personal ability to overcome adversity, but you'll do even better if you combine that with external support. To be honest, I'm not sure how that can be misconstrued on Hacker News, when people frequently focus on the power of groups working together (whether that's open source, corporations, or other organizations). It's clear that some of the most lauded organizations are ones that often support their members, especially in times of hardship. This comes from someone who is very much a proponent of perseverance. My first tattoo enshrines this Japanese proverb on my forearm where I can always see it: 七転び八起き Fall seven times, stand up eight
- lioeters 3y ago
  The proverb is associated with a figure called Daruma, with a round physique that always gets up no matter how it's knocked down. It's cute and symbolic, popular in Japanese culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daruma_doll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daruma_doll
Paul-Craft 3y ago
I don't see how it's downplaying anything, except in comparison to money and friends. Given that it's fairly obvious that almost all problems can be solved or seriously mitigated by money and friends, I think it's a fair conclusion to say that money and friends are strictly superior to (internal) resilience. I also think the example and conclusion they gave was perfect: little problems are much bigger when you don't have the tools available to effectively solve them, and those tools are money and friends, which are sources of external resilience. They're not saying internal resilience is bad; they're simply saying that not having to get to the point of needing to be internally resilient is strictly better. These all seem like fair statements that sound like they come from the department of "no shit, Sherlock," to me.
QuantumGood 3y ago
When I was younger, there were those who were commonly late or no shows, and their futures rarely went in a good direction. For myself I found I had to acquire quite a bit of resilience to reach average reliability. The youngest generations now see things like a non-fixed schedule as a lifestyle perk—and they're right—but I worry about how they can acquire resilience from this and other areas.
eternityforest 3y ago
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there suffering from lack of resilience, especially those who's goals are focused on inherently hard things... But there are so many graduates of the school of hard knocks giving straight up dangerous advice and people might want to be more careful.

anotherhue 3y ago

This sort of gaslighting is incredibly common. The resilience we need is against believing a word any company says. You're only ever one 'company reset' [0] [1] away from the kerb. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918643 1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=layoff&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

black_13 3y ago
[dead]

stanleykm 3y ago

Pretty galling that we have one of the most prominent capitalist cheerleaders out here telling us we need more friends and money when they have such an outsized influence on the reasons we have neither.

patrickmcnamara 3y ago
Could you explain what you mean?
- wharvle 3y ago
  I'd suppose it's a reference to rich people having far more influence on public and economic policy than the working class, and those policies in turn having a substantial effect both on how people interact and who has money, especially when examined over a decades-long time horizon.
  - theGnuMe 3y ago
    True but the tools and approach is all there. Just have to community build and develop a super PAC.
- stanleykm 3y ago
  I’ll do my best but I wont pretend to be the best person to talk about this. The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human. To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days. Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.

TriangleEdge 3y ago

I agree with the title, I don't think it matter how resilient you are if you have no friends and no money. The Veritasium YouTube channel debunked the fact that money doesn't make you happier (it does) and that there's a plateau (there isn't). I also learnt from Jordan Peterson that you only get positive emotion if you follow a goal. You can't follow a goal if you have no money. Anecdote: being poor is the most soul crushing thing that has happened to me. In my early 20s, I would go dancing sometimes and someone would approach me saying "you should buy me a drink" and I remember saying no because I had like 50$ total. Note, I was not blessed with loving parents. I don't know for sure, but I am willing to bet that people with more money have more friends with higher quality and deeper bonds then people with less money. I do think this plateaus however.

redserk 3y ago
Financial reasons or not, it is an entirely valid choice to decline someone's request for a drink.
- fragmede 3y ago
  It's a valid choice, but so is theirs to not continue to interact with you.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Right, but as soperj said, the people you miss out on are the people who will dump you because you won't spend money on them. Missing out on them is likely to be a net win.
  - fhdkweig 3y ago
    That's the difference between a life-long friendship and a business transaction.
- Levitz 3y ago
  It's still soul crushing. It's internalized in a whole different way. When you have two, you have two, when you have one, you have none, what is it? Options. When you don't have a dime you don't choose not to spend money, your brain never gets there, it's just a "no" and the "no" is because you are poor.

npilk 3y ago

Based on the headline, I expected this article to argue that success in business depends more on connections and resources than it does purely on resilience.

worik 3y ago
That's true too

throw__away7391 3y ago

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marssaxman 3y ago
I am so sorry to hear that your life works that way, and I hope someday you find better friends.
ragnot 3y ago
I think people are downvoting you because of the way you delivered the message rather than the content of the message. As I've gotten older, I've realized it is actually more healthy to view professional contacts in this manner (but not necessarily family). It helps compartmentalize their behavior (which is intrinsically self-motivated) to just being "how the game is played".
- deleted 3y ago
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forward1 3y ago
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- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  What is your take on philosophies which would encourage you instead to be more patient with people and anticipate their needing and insecurity? From that perspective, becoming a better man would mean becoming more patient, compassionate, and at ease with the way people typically are. I’m not saying I disagree. I find the contrast in views really interesting.
  - forward1 3y ago
    They are just that - philosophies. I live my life based on first-hand experience only, not the musings of a professor or even a poet. And I'm sorry to say it is as follows: not all people deserve compassion, nor patience. Most of the people I've come across in life are plainly stupid by choice, and a stupid person is the most dangerous kind. On the other hand, individuals with special needs, children and animals are mostly defenseless in this world and actually deserve our attention. I have focused my time and resources on helping them (versus the family and friends "in need") and this has proven to be more fulfilling, and I believe ultimately more selfless than my past self.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

I remember a conversation I had with my doctor once. She was talking about her son, and mused that she thought my disability had made me a much grittier and conscientious person than most of my peers. That's a nice sentiment, but something I noticed when I eventually managed to graduate college was that there was no substitute for a good safety net and parental support. I watched dumbfounded as some of my classmates went on to found or join risky startups during the great recession. For me, failure would have been catastrophic. I'd have likely wound up sleeping under a bridge. I was amazed they were so fearless! Only, I later learned the reason they were so fearless is they knew their parents would step in and pay for their living expenses while they got back on their feet. TLDR: Some folks can swing for the fences, take outsized risks, and reap the rewards, because failure is always an option.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
TLDR: money takes away the risk. When it's all upside, there is no risk, it's just a distribution of possible upsides.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Yep, and it's made me reconsider my conservative risk tolerance now that I'm finally financially independent. I'm not sure if I should 'swing for the fences' or 'take a knee and run out the clock'. Probably the latter. I'm not sure I'm hungry enough to put up with a startup in my 40's.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    according to statistics, many successful startups are by people in their 40s. ok, so if you are not hungry enough, that's fine, but i think being financially independent at 40 seems to be the best time to throw yourself into a startup. since you are already financially secure you don't have to overwork yourself, but you can take it a bit slower.
DoubleDerper 3y ago
Resilience: Stay strong when you're product launch isn't going well. Resilience: Stay strong when you're a working single mother struggling to pay rent and feed your kids. The techno-twitter teeth grinders would have you believe these are the same. They are not.

VirusNewbie 3y ago

I interviewed for a dream position at a huge tech co a few years ago . I cold applied after seeing the job ad in the "who is hiring" on HN. That alone felt like a big step, I had never done one of those grueling long interviews people talk about, and someone reached back out. I studied, I practiced coding fast, I did mock interviews, but I was still nervous as hell to actually try one with real stakes. I thought my resume was a perfect fit, an intersection of fairly niche technologies and skills that I actually had. I had to do multiple screening rounds, solve leetcode-esque problems. I made it to the onsite! My nerves were going crazy but, the first coding problem, I went right to work, my fingers were flying, and by the end of it I could see that my interviewer was more than pleased. He said I finished early and we could just chat about life at BigCo. The second round was similar, and the third round! Fourth round, not as great, but I didn't completely whiff on the question. And..........I got rejected. I was in the dumps for months. Maybe I wasn't cut out for big tech. I'm not smart enough. I don't have impressive credentials. But eventually I said fuck it, I'm going again. I applied to a few more jobs and.....started getting offers at top tier companies. The algorithmic thinking is hard, coding fast is hard, not letting my nerves get the best of me is hard, explaining my thought process took practice, but just having the resilience to go through the process after hard rejection was crucial. I had a job at the time, and part of me really wanted to just give up and say I was content with my gig at a small company. But I didn't give up. I hope I can pass on that trait to my son one day.

asquabventured 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. The world needs more examples of perseverance leading to success. I think a lot of people think success should come without perseverance. Maybe it works that way for some people but it sure doesn't for me. Cheers
oldpersonintx 3y ago
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oldpersonintx 3y ago

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korse 3y ago

I see a whole lot of people talking about net givers and net takers and how these dynamics affect the usefulness of a friend/acquaintance group. This is HN. Private bit torrent trackers anyone? The higher your seed-to-leech ratio in a small community, the more use the community will be to you. This applies directly to friend groups. If each person tries to seed the group with actions that benefit many but are trivial for them to accomplish based on personal stats, everyone benefits disproportionately to the individual effort invested. High ratios can then be tapped for uncommon and/or infrequent requests without compromising relationships.

rawgabbit 3y ago

The article is more insightful than the title lets on. The author said employees should quit your demanding job and employers should help their employees instead of paying lip service about inner strength. As for deeper changes, business self-help authors — who often make their real money not from selling books, but from paid speaking and consulting gigs at large companies — aren’t about to tell you to quit your draining job and take a (perhaps lower-paid) role at a less-demanding organization. Nor do most of them suggest policy changes that contribute to a more resilient workforce — such as paid sick days, parental leave or flexible staffing models — that cost companies money. It’s safer for their business model to keep emphasizing inner strength. And maybe, too, that message plays well with an audience that hates to admit there can be trade-offs.

sonorous_sub 3y ago

Chicken or egg?

kridsdale1 3y ago

Girls don’t like Boys; Girls like Cars and Money.

mock-possum 3y ago
Turns Out Boys Also Like Cars And Money

iteratethis 3y ago

Corporations love the tale of resilience. You'll have evil corp pushing their employees to the max. Then HR sends an email "we care about your mental health", which includes a link to an e-course on meditation. They do not care about your mental health because they don't spent a second addressing the root cause of the overload of stress. All of society now has this fatalism built in. The believe that we can fix problems and improve life for all is largely gone. Instead, the energy is that we accept that the future is bleak, make no effort to change it, expect things to perpetually get even worse, and somehow at an individual level try to find some marginal happiness within this reality we see as a given. I'm personally not as pessimistic as the above suggests, just saying this is the culture.

Paullittle12345 3y ago

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