6 ms·

Extremely out of touch and not useful at all. He needs to learn how to tell when he has something important to say and when he’s just yapping. How can he think

Extremely out of touch and not useful at all. He needs to learn how to tell when he has something important to say and when he’s just yapping. How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
msvan 2y ago
This is because you chose to live an expensive life. Most of the world gets by on less.
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Most of the world also gets by on much more affordable housing too, though.
- asdf6969 2y ago
  I spend around 25% of my income
  - sph 2y ago
    How much time do you spend following someone else's dream? Wealth is inconsequential if you spend 80 hours a week at a FAANG and have no time left for yourself, to plan a different life. The famous golden handcuffs.
    - not-really-true 2y ago
      That's not quite true though, you can get a pretty well paid job in FAANG adjacent that leaves you with enough free time too. Living in expensive areas has a lot of cons too, a social life for instance, which you don't really have in a rural area. If that's not important to you, great, seems like you have it all figured it out, live on a small income in the middle of nowhere, but not everybody's dream looks like this
    - martindbp 2y ago
      That's just cope. With that savings rate he can save for 10 years and spend the next 40 years doing his own thing. As long as you keep your standard of living the same.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    So you can retire in 7 years, right? https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
- kevmo314 2y ago
  Most of the world doesn't get the opportunity to pursue their passions.
Sebb767 2y ago
> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making. [0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.
- asdf6969 2y ago
  > If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible Do you really believe this?
  - mkoubaa 2y ago
    Sadly, probably. My family did two years of farming as amateurs between jobs when I was a preteen. It stunted my height and caused decades of chronic pain for my parents. And we didn't make enough to live on
  - Sebb767 2y ago
    I actually know this. I personally know a few people who do accept major financial restraint in exchange for pursuing their passion. To be fair, I'm from Europe, so I can't personally verify whether this still works in the US or if the stories I've heard were false, but this does at least provide a counterpoint to this not being possible in western countries.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    I have family that does this in WI. It's viable, but hard work.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Farmers tend to have very high net worths and very low disposable income until they get old. You need several million dollars worth of land just to make the payments on that land/equipment and have enough left over to live on. And of course there are years where you will lose money and so you need to figure out how to ride that out. Then in 30 years you make the last payment on the land and suddenly what was just barely enough money to live on is a massive income and you are extremely wealthy. I work in flyover country. I'm not a farmer my self, but several of my co workers are - they farm 100 acres of land after work, and it generates just enough money to make the payments land payments. They are looking to buy more land as soon as they can finance it (often leasing it to a neighbor to farm as they don't have time and so they lose money on the land). Their plan is in 15-20 years inflation will have made crops more valuable while the land payments are the same and so they can afford to quit the day job and farm all their land. Getting started is the hard part. Getting two million dollar loan for 100 acres of prime farmland when you are not already a farmer is hard. Many farmers thus start with livestock, you can start on 10 acres of non-prime farmland which is affordable and then over a few years build enough credibility with the bank to get that first large field which is where the money is.
sevensor 2y ago
PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to throw themselves into the startup furnace that fuels his wealth. “The very rich are no longer human” as William Gibson put it.
- randomopining 2y ago
  Also sometimes when adults try to pull kids towards something, they may be trying to validate their own life choices and pathway. Just like a parent getting his kid into football, always remembering that he lost the playoff game.
- segmondy 2y ago
  He's no longer writing from practical experience.
safety1st 2y ago
It's not a bad article, and right now there's a lot of hand-wringing in the comments by people who in all frankness probably just don't have the balls to pursue their passion. Pretty early in my career I decided that the future of a tech bro at a FAANG was not for me so I quit. For one thing I saw that the men who were 10-20 years ahead of me on that track didn't actually have great personal lives. For another Big Tech was rapidly morphing into a net negative for humanity and I was sick of enabling it. I knew I wanted to work with open source because it was ethically superior but didn't know exactly what or how. It led initially to several years of wandering the world as a digital nomad and freelancing to pay the bills. In the long run I started a bootstrapped open source company, now have about 12 people on payroll, and am 15 years expatriated and living in a country that I'm way way happier in with plenty of money and the markers of what people consider "success." It also required me to do many many things that I didn't want to do or never thought I would do, a great example is learning how to sell things effectively, because initially if I didn't, I wouldn't eat. Then later, because it was the difference between just getting by and becoming rich. It is completely possible to live your passion while being successful. To do it you have to temper your passion with realism. You cannot lie to yourself about what the world wants from you nor can you ever use it as an excuse for inaction. Passion requires sacrifice, it's choosing A over B repeatedly, this is its definition. It certainly does mean that you might have to move, or make compromises in other areas of your life. But if you're at the stage where you're still single and childless, and you're light years away from your passion because of money - frankly I think you're just a pussy. You have more freedom at that stage of life than any other. If you're doing something you don't care for, you have nothing to lose by blowing it to smithereens. Or you can go on bitching about it on social media, like 95% of people do, and getting deeply involved in reasons that your dissatisfaction is someone else's fault. Look at older people who stayed in a situation they hated because that was where inertia and a lack of balls kept them. Get to know them. If you want their life to be yours soon enough then keep on doing what you're doing.
- jjxw 2y ago
  I think it's great that you had the conviction and risk taking appetite to find success and in retrospect be able to say it was the "right" choice for you. I also think there's some great advice in there about benchmarking the road that you're headed down and asking yourself if it is the right road for you. However, I think this comment veers off into a tone that, for me, is a bit judgmental and prescriptive. Even out of the group of people who are single and childless people have different life situations, people have different risk tolerances, and there's not a one size fit all solution to quitting your job and chasing your passion for everyone. Not to mention unfortunately some people sacrifice a lot in pursuit of what they want and end up with nothing or very little to show for it in the end. Again I think your comment comes from a good place and there's some useful advice here, but the unnecessary name calling is a bit of a turn off at least for me and overall reduces the effectiveness of communicating your advice.
lacker 2y ago
I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks. Forget the PG essay. Doesn't it seem like there's something wrong here, something you're missing, some way in which your own feelings about your own life are too negative, perhaps like you're emotionally harder on yourself than you deserve?
- martindbp 2y ago
  Would love to know the details of their situation. I'm guessing this is a case of hedonic treadmill and keeping up with the Joneses, or just generally extremely high expectations. And even if you have a high income that doesn't mean you can have everything you want right away.
  - sfpotter 2y ago
    A "high income" is relative. They might actually have a well-calibrated expectation for what "high" means based on being close to people who don't have high incomes---that is, being in the top 25% should be high by any measure, but in plenty of US cities, even being in the top 25% is no guarantee that you'll be able to afford a mortgage as well as other very important expenses like childcare, paying off student loan debt, caring for extended family, etc, etc. You could look at a situation like this and tell someone to "just change something" or be patient, but the reality is simply much more complicated. People who are struggling to deal with these scenarios are the ones who are best equipped to assess them, not people looking in from the outside.
will-burner 2y ago
I can't tell if this is a serious comment or a joke. Tons of people make "a little bit of money" and mange to get by and are even happy.
zahlman 2y ago
> How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. Many things in life are surprisingly optional. There are people out there, in the developed world, who do not consider themselves poor, spending scarcely more money than the cost of food (mostly homemade from basic ingredients), rent and utilities. Speaking of rent: in a functioning market, it's cheaper than a mortgage + property tax, not to mention you have much more flexibility to pay for more or less living space. The money that you don't put towards home equity could go into... equity (i.e. stocks and bonds) instead.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

msvan 2y ago

This is because you chose to live an expensive life. Most of the world gets by on less.

steve_adams_86 2y ago
Most of the world also gets by on much more affordable housing too, though.
asdf6969 2y ago
I spend around 25% of my income
- sph 2y ago
  How much time do you spend following someone else's dream? Wealth is inconsequential if you spend 80 hours a week at a FAANG and have no time left for yourself, to plan a different life. The famous golden handcuffs.
  - not-really-true 2y ago
    That's not quite true though, you can get a pretty well paid job in FAANG adjacent that leaves you with enough free time too. Living in expensive areas has a lot of cons too, a social life for instance, which you don't really have in a rural area. If that's not important to you, great, seems like you have it all figured it out, live on a small income in the middle of nowhere, but not everybody's dream looks like this
  - martindbp 2y ago
    That's just cope. With that savings rate he can save for 10 years and spend the next 40 years doing his own thing. As long as you keep your standard of living the same.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  So you can retire in 7 years, right? https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
kevmo314 2y ago
Most of the world doesn't get the opportunity to pursue their passions.

Sebb767 2y ago

> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making. [0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.

asdf6969 2y ago
> If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible Do you really believe this?
- mkoubaa 2y ago
  Sadly, probably. My family did two years of farming as amateurs between jobs when I was a preteen. It stunted my height and caused decades of chronic pain for my parents. And we didn't make enough to live on
- Sebb767 2y ago
  I actually know this. I personally know a few people who do accept major financial restraint in exchange for pursuing their passion. To be fair, I'm from Europe, so I can't personally verify whether this still works in the US or if the stories I've heard were false, but this does at least provide a counterpoint to this not being possible in western countries.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I have family that does this in WI. It's viable, but hard work.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Farmers tend to have very high net worths and very low disposable income until they get old. You need several million dollars worth of land just to make the payments on that land/equipment and have enough left over to live on. And of course there are years where you will lose money and so you need to figure out how to ride that out. Then in 30 years you make the last payment on the land and suddenly what was just barely enough money to live on is a massive income and you are extremely wealthy. I work in flyover country. I'm not a farmer my self, but several of my co workers are - they farm 100 acres of land after work, and it generates just enough money to make the payments land payments. They are looking to buy more land as soon as they can finance it (often leasing it to a neighbor to farm as they don't have time and so they lose money on the land). Their plan is in 15-20 years inflation will have made crops more valuable while the land payments are the same and so they can afford to quit the day job and farm all their land. Getting started is the hard part. Getting two million dollar loan for 100 acres of prime farmland when you are not already a farmer is hard. Many farmers thus start with livestock, you can start on 10 acres of non-prime farmland which is affordable and then over a few years build enough credibility with the bank to get that first large field which is where the money is.

sevensor 2y ago

PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to throw themselves into the startup furnace that fuels his wealth. “The very rich are no longer human” as William Gibson put it.

randomopining 2y ago
Also sometimes when adults try to pull kids towards something, they may be trying to validate their own life choices and pathway. Just like a parent getting his kid into football, always remembering that he lost the playoff game.
segmondy 2y ago
He's no longer writing from practical experience.

safety1st 2y ago

It's not a bad article, and right now there's a lot of hand-wringing in the comments by people who in all frankness probably just don't have the balls to pursue their passion. Pretty early in my career I decided that the future of a tech bro at a FAANG was not for me so I quit. For one thing I saw that the men who were 10-20 years ahead of me on that track didn't actually have great personal lives. For another Big Tech was rapidly morphing into a net negative for humanity and I was sick of enabling it. I knew I wanted to work with open source because it was ethically superior but didn't know exactly what or how. It led initially to several years of wandering the world as a digital nomad and freelancing to pay the bills. In the long run I started a bootstrapped open source company, now have about 12 people on payroll, and am 15 years expatriated and living in a country that I'm way way happier in with plenty of money and the markers of what people consider "success." It also required me to do many many things that I didn't want to do or never thought I would do, a great example is learning how to sell things effectively, because initially if I didn't, I wouldn't eat. Then later, because it was the difference between just getting by and becoming rich. It is completely possible to live your passion while being successful. To do it you have to temper your passion with realism. You cannot lie to yourself about what the world wants from you nor can you ever use it as an excuse for inaction. Passion requires sacrifice, it's choosing A over B repeatedly, this is its definition. It certainly does mean that you might have to move, or make compromises in other areas of your life. But if you're at the stage where you're still single and childless, and you're light years away from your passion because of money - frankly I think you're just a pussy. You have more freedom at that stage of life than any other. If you're doing something you don't care for, you have nothing to lose by blowing it to smithereens. Or you can go on bitching about it on social media, like 95% of people do, and getting deeply involved in reasons that your dissatisfaction is someone else's fault. Look at older people who stayed in a situation they hated because that was where inertia and a lack of balls kept them. Get to know them. If you want their life to be yours soon enough then keep on doing what you're doing.

jjxw 2y ago
I think it's great that you had the conviction and risk taking appetite to find success and in retrospect be able to say it was the "right" choice for you. I also think there's some great advice in there about benchmarking the road that you're headed down and asking yourself if it is the right road for you. However, I think this comment veers off into a tone that, for me, is a bit judgmental and prescriptive. Even out of the group of people who are single and childless people have different life situations, people have different risk tolerances, and there's not a one size fit all solution to quitting your job and chasing your passion for everyone. Not to mention unfortunately some people sacrifice a lot in pursuit of what they want and end up with nothing or very little to show for it in the end. Again I think your comment comes from a good place and there's some useful advice here, but the unnecessary name calling is a bit of a turn off at least for me and overall reduces the effectiveness of communicating your advice.

lacker 2y ago

I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. I can’t even imagine how terrible my life would be if I took risks. Forget the PG essay. Doesn't it seem like there's something wrong here, something you're missing, some way in which your own feelings about your own life are too negative, perhaps like you're emotionally harder on yourself than you deserve?

martindbp 2y ago
Would love to know the details of their situation. I'm guessing this is a case of hedonic treadmill and keeping up with the Joneses, or just generally extremely high expectations. And even if you have a high income that doesn't mean you can have everything you want right away.
- sfpotter 2y ago
  A "high income" is relative. They might actually have a well-calibrated expectation for what "high" means based on being close to people who don't have high incomes---that is, being in the top 25% should be high by any measure, but in plenty of US cities, even being in the top 25% is no guarantee that you'll be able to afford a mortgage as well as other very important expenses like childcare, paying off student loan debt, caring for extended family, etc, etc. You could look at a situation like this and tell someone to "just change something" or be patient, but the reality is simply much more complicated. People who are struggling to deal with these scenarios are the ones who are best equipped to assess them, not people looking in from the outside.

will-burner 2y ago

I can't tell if this is a serious comment or a joke. Tons of people make "a little bit of money" and mange to get by and are even happy.

zahlman 2y ago

> How can he think making just a little bit of money is even an option? I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home. Many things in life are surprisingly optional. There are people out there, in the developed world, who do not consider themselves poor, spending scarcely more money than the cost of food (mostly homemade from basic ingredients), rent and utilities. Speaking of rent: in a functioning market, it's cheaper than a mortgage + property tax, not to mention you have much more flexibility to pay for more or less living space. The money that you don't put towards home equity could go into... equity (i.e. stocks and bonds) instead.