7 ms·

I don’t think his problem is money. I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared. Now he needs to develop a new identity. This

by cj 2y ago

I don’t think his problem is money. I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared. Now he needs to develop a new identity. This is especially difficult for single founders without kids (in the sense that people with spouse/kids already derive much of their identity from those 2 things). Selling a company isn’t all that different from going through a divorce (in the sense that your identity needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch)

bumby 2y ago
William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.
- philosopher1234 2y ago
  Hard to take such general advice seriously from someone who apparently doesn’t practice it. In fact, it seems mistaken to do so.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    do as I say not as I do is core of all parenting… :)
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    if the first person to notice a correlation between alcoholism and cirrhosis was an alcoholic, you'd dismiss what he said out of hand and keep drinking?
- cal85 2y ago
  In what book? Searched but can’t find anything that sounds like this.
  - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
    My guess is The Status Game by Will Storr.
    - bumby 2y ago
      That’s correct, thanks for clarifying.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > humans hard wired for status within their social group. Not always "status". Humans benefit from cooperative behaviour but may have many reasons for joining and adhering or leaving. Having varied interests means different networks. The important point is to see meaning and value. This is where ostracism and rejection can be most painful.
  - bumby 2y ago
    To put a finer point on it, Storr’s thesis is there are three main domains that humans try to achieve status: dominance, competence, and virtue. Same end goal, but different means to get esteem. Put differently, people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe.
    - heresie-dabord 2y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. There must be more subtlety in the "end goal" of membership. > people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe To the extent that people want to remain in a group ("tribe"), I agree. But this holds only when people feel that they gain value from the group (or tribe). For some members, the sense of gain may be conspicuous prestige, but for other members it may be a humble gain or an unnoticed (inconspicuous) gain. The quieter members (in O.P.'s narcissistic terminology, the "NPCs" in his company) may have insights that completely escape the O.P. and other prestige-seekers.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- purplethinking 2y ago
  I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    Keep it simple, then pivot. Most people don't care that much about what you do unless they're in your same industry (in which case, they'd empathize). > What do you do? Write software. > Oh yeah, for who? $GitProjectName > What do they do? It's a project that <short explanation>. But enough about me, <pivot to different topic | shift focus to the other person>
    - tobyjsullivan 2y ago
      Thoughtful approach in theory but, in practice, I've found people can be very intentional about trying to measure your value to the tribe (i.e., it's not only something we measure for ourselves). If the initial answers don't provide enough data, people will very often dig in. > Oh yeah, for who? $GitProjectName > Oh, I'm not familiar. How big is that company? It's an independent project, I'm just getting it off the ground. > Do you have any customers? ... and so on. Yes, it's easiest to change the subject but that also becomes an obvious signal. Repeating this dance a few times is enough to dampen one's sense of self worth. I don't necessarily think this value-measuring is conscious or necessarily reflective of the person's character. It felt more like it's simply the habitual conversational pattern for a lot of people - we've been trained to quickly assess if someone is "like us" (based on very shallow criteria and heuristics).
      - purplethinking 2y ago
        There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.
t55 2y ago
[flagged]
iknownthing 2y ago
Is this not the same problem everyone faces when they retire?
- driverdan 2y ago
  No, only people who define their lives by their job. Most people have a life outside of work.
  - philosopher1234 2y ago
    The vast majority of men develop depression at retirement. So you can say this with scorn if it pleases you, but the group you’re talking about is massive and doesn’t deserve this derision.
    - johngossman 2y ago
      1 in 3 according to the best data available. And when you consider that most people retire late in life when they are likely to face health issues, start losing family and friends, and that most people don't retire rich...
      - jandrese 2y ago
        I think it is more that people who were married to their job find themselves suddenly divorced. Without other activities to give them a reason to get up in the morning it is easy to fall into depression. There was even a movie that explores this situation: About Schmidt.
    - jerojero 2y ago
      There could be a lot of factors involved in this. Retirement might be, in a way, a clear point in life when you get to actually think about your own mortality and life coming to an end in the next few decades. That alone could have a major impact in people developing depression at retirement. What the poster says might still be true, people are being defined by their work and when that's over there's a huge gap they don't know how to fill. This might very well be a criticism on the role of work in society. Ultimately though, you're right, there's no need to insult people when thinking critically about this issue.
paulpauper 2y ago
It says on wiki: In 2022, according to Forbes, the firm was valued at $1.5 billion, having secured $200 million in funding from venture funds such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins.[1][2] It is remote, but is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in New York. Why would such a seemingly simple product need so much money? It seems like the business was already done. Web video recording or facetime has been around a long time, but somehow this company carved a niche in a crowded market.
- voidhorse 2y ago
  They slapped the word AI on it and took advantage of temporary market conditions (wfh due to covid and AI hype), nothing more, nothing less. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing special about this product and probably no one will remember it in ~15 years time. Meanwhile OP seems to think he should have expected the same sense of fulfillment one might get from an actually meaningful contribution to human society, for some reason.
  - sfblah 2y ago
    Very very well said. OP's vapid writing kind of tells the tale.
  - redlock 2y ago
    What does loom have anything to do with AI? It is a nifty way to share video recordings easily and quickly. In that they did a great job
    - msanlop 2y ago
      >One video is worth a thousand words >Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity This is the first thing you see when visiting the website. Ctrl+F finds "AI" 10 times in the page. Like the other commenter said, it probably has nothing to do with AI, but this is what sells at the moment
- 2y ago
nooneevencares 2y ago
Probably needs to develop a soul first. NPCs don’t actually exist outside of video games, those are real human beings. Not sure what to do with all that wealth? Try asking one of those NPCs… spend a day with each one of them, learn what being human actually is
- voidhorse 2y ago
  Yep. I don't understand why the technological community accepts essentially sociopathic tendencies as long as your idea (regardless of what that idea is) is rewarded by the capital system. It's pathetic.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    It's not pathetic, it's destructive and evil.
- nateburke 2y ago
  Yes. Thinking of others as NPCs has its own way of turning ones self into an NPC. cf. Mean Girls
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  Calling people NPCs is one of my biggest pet peeves and a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist. It is dehumanizing in the extreme, the same way Nazis characterized Jews as rats in propaganda. When people say eat the rich… this is who they mean
  - ddq 2y ago
    >a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist You're engaging in the exact same behavior, are you not? NPC and soulless are the same fundamental concept, that there is a certain threshold of humanity people can fall below to be considered lesser. They're soulless, they're NPCs, they're untermenschen... whatever the word for it, there are "dead giveaways" that a person can lack that hidden quality that separates man from animal. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but from a certain reading, it seems like what you're saying isn't really all that far off from "calls people NPCs = is the real NPC". I often see people decry specific terminology associated with dehumanizing beliefs without refuting the actual premise behind them.
Krei-se 2y ago
True, i would still argue that your identity might be fogged by these things and come out clearer after lifting roles you may stumbled into more than you chose them. So sure hope for him and others they survive their 7 years of catharsis!
nico 2y ago
> I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared. This is spot on. And I think it’s probably the biggest thing he’s going through However, the money is definitely a big factor as well. Not because of the amount of money, but because of the suddenness that it happened with In a very short amount of time, he found himself not needing (and realizing also not wanting), to maintain his identity at the time The money and the suddenness also put him in a situation that is pretty hard to relate to for the vast majority of people So not only he lost his identity, he also found himself alone (and made it even worse, by pushing people away or ending some relationships)
lazyasciiart 2y ago
He doesn't think his problem is money either, because that would have a trivial and obvious solution that doesn't seem to be under consideration.
Fomite 2y ago
I don't think his problem is money. I think his problem is he might not be a very good person.
- simonswords82 2y ago
  If true, he probably knows this already and now just needs to work out how to fix it.
mupuff1234 2y ago
Reminds me of this Jim Carrey speech https://youtu.be/YHIZ0Rb7lv0?si=TG_SIi-XUuP1iHYf https://youtu.be/YHIZ0Rb7lv0?si=TG_SIi-XUuP1iHYf

by cj 2y ago

bumby 2y ago

William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.

philosopher1234 2y ago
Hard to take such general advice seriously from someone who apparently doesn’t practice it. In fact, it seems mistaken to do so.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bdangubic 2y ago
  do as I say not as I do is core of all parenting… :)
- fsckboy 2y ago
  if the first person to notice a correlation between alcoholism and cirrhosis was an alcoholic, you'd dismiss what he said out of hand and keep drinking?
cal85 2y ago
In what book? Searched but can’t find anything that sounds like this.
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  My guess is The Status Game by Will Storr.
  - bumby 2y ago
    That’s correct, thanks for clarifying.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> humans hard wired for status within their social group. Not always "status". Humans benefit from cooperative behaviour but may have many reasons for joining and adhering or leaving. Having varied interests means different networks. The important point is to see meaning and value. This is where ostracism and rejection can be most painful.
- bumby 2y ago
  To put a finer point on it, Storr’s thesis is there are three main domains that humans try to achieve status: dominance, competence, and virtue. Same end goal, but different means to get esteem. Put differently, people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe.
  - heresie-dabord 2y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. There must be more subtlety in the "end goal" of membership. > people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe To the extent that people want to remain in a group ("tribe"), I agree. But this holds only when people feel that they gain value from the group (or tribe). For some members, the sense of gain may be conspicuous prestige, but for other members it may be a humble gain or an unnoticed (inconspicuous) gain. The quieter members (in O.P.'s narcissistic terminology, the "NPCs" in his company) may have insights that completely escape the O.P. and other prestige-seekers.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
purplethinking 2y ago
I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  Keep it simple, then pivot. Most people don't care that much about what you do unless they're in your same industry (in which case, they'd empathize). > What do you do? Write software. > Oh yeah, for who? $GitProjectName > What do they do? It's a project that <short explanation>. But enough about me, <pivot to different topic | shift focus to the other person>
  - tobyjsullivan 2y ago
    Thoughtful approach in theory but, in practice, I've found people can be very intentional about trying to measure your value to the tribe (i.e., it's not only something we measure for ourselves). If the initial answers don't provide enough data, people will very often dig in. > Oh yeah, for who? $GitProjectName > Oh, I'm not familiar. How big is that company? It's an independent project, I'm just getting it off the ground. > Do you have any customers? ... and so on. Yes, it's easiest to change the subject but that also becomes an obvious signal. Repeating this dance a few times is enough to dampen one's sense of self worth. I don't necessarily think this value-measuring is conscious or necessarily reflective of the person's character. It felt more like it's simply the habitual conversational pattern for a lot of people - we've been trained to quickly assess if someone is "like us" (based on very shallow criteria and heuristics).
    - purplethinking 2y ago
      There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.

t55 2y ago

[flagged]

iknownthing 2y ago

Is this not the same problem everyone faces when they retire?

driverdan 2y ago
No, only people who define their lives by their job. Most people have a life outside of work.
- philosopher1234 2y ago
  The vast majority of men develop depression at retirement. So you can say this with scorn if it pleases you, but the group you’re talking about is massive and doesn’t deserve this derision.
  - johngossman 2y ago
    1 in 3 according to the best data available. And when you consider that most people retire late in life when they are likely to face health issues, start losing family and friends, and that most people don't retire rich...
    - jandrese 2y ago
      I think it is more that people who were married to their job find themselves suddenly divorced. Without other activities to give them a reason to get up in the morning it is easy to fall into depression. There was even a movie that explores this situation: About Schmidt.
  - jerojero 2y ago
    There could be a lot of factors involved in this. Retirement might be, in a way, a clear point in life when you get to actually think about your own mortality and life coming to an end in the next few decades. That alone could have a major impact in people developing depression at retirement. What the poster says might still be true, people are being defined by their work and when that's over there's a huge gap they don't know how to fill. This might very well be a criticism on the role of work in society. Ultimately though, you're right, there's no need to insult people when thinking critically about this issue.

paulpauper 2y ago

It says on wiki: In 2022, according to Forbes, the firm was valued at $1.5 billion, having secured $200 million in funding from venture funds such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins.[1][2] It is remote, but is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in New York. Why would such a seemingly simple product need so much money? It seems like the business was already done. Web video recording or facetime has been around a long time, but somehow this company carved a niche in a crowded market.

voidhorse 2y ago
They slapped the word AI on it and took advantage of temporary market conditions (wfh due to covid and AI hype), nothing more, nothing less. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing special about this product and probably no one will remember it in ~15 years time. Meanwhile OP seems to think he should have expected the same sense of fulfillment one might get from an actually meaningful contribution to human society, for some reason.
- sfblah 2y ago
  Very very well said. OP's vapid writing kind of tells the tale.
- redlock 2y ago
  What does loom have anything to do with AI? It is a nifty way to share video recordings easily and quickly. In that they did a great job
  - msanlop 2y ago
    >One video is worth a thousand words >Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity This is the first thing you see when visiting the website. Ctrl+F finds "AI" 10 times in the page. Like the other commenter said, it probably has nothing to do with AI, but this is what sells at the moment
2y ago

nooneevencares 2y ago

Probably needs to develop a soul first. NPCs don’t actually exist outside of video games, those are real human beings. Not sure what to do with all that wealth? Try asking one of those NPCs… spend a day with each one of them, learn what being human actually is

voidhorse 2y ago
Yep. I don't understand why the technological community accepts essentially sociopathic tendencies as long as your idea (regardless of what that idea is) is rewarded by the capital system. It's pathetic.
- thfuran 2y ago
  It's not pathetic, it's destructive and evil.
nateburke 2y ago
Yes. Thinking of others as NPCs has its own way of turning ones self into an NPC. cf. Mean Girls
mcmcmc 2y ago
Calling people NPCs is one of my biggest pet peeves and a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist. It is dehumanizing in the extreme, the same way Nazis characterized Jews as rats in propaganda. When people say eat the rich… this is who they mean
- ddq 2y ago
  >a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist You're engaging in the exact same behavior, are you not? NPC and soulless are the same fundamental concept, that there is a certain threshold of humanity people can fall below to be considered lesser. They're soulless, they're NPCs, they're untermenschen... whatever the word for it, there are "dead giveaways" that a person can lack that hidden quality that separates man from animal. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but from a certain reading, it seems like what you're saying isn't really all that far off from "calls people NPCs = is the real NPC". I often see people decry specific terminology associated with dehumanizing beliefs without refuting the actual premise behind them.

Krei-se 2y ago

True, i would still argue that your identity might be fogged by these things and come out clearer after lifting roles you may stumbled into more than you chose them. So sure hope for him and others they survive their 7 years of catharsis!

nico 2y ago

> I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared. This is spot on. And I think it’s probably the biggest thing he’s going through However, the money is definitely a big factor as well. Not because of the amount of money, but because of the suddenness that it happened with In a very short amount of time, he found himself not needing (and realizing also not wanting), to maintain his identity at the time The money and the suddenness also put him in a situation that is pretty hard to relate to for the vast majority of people So not only he lost his identity, he also found himself alone (and made it even worse, by pushing people away or ending some relationships)

lazyasciiart 2y ago

He doesn't think his problem is money either, because that would have a trivial and obvious solution that doesn't seem to be under consideration.

Fomite 2y ago

I don't think his problem is money. I think his problem is he might not be a very good person.

simonswords82 2y ago
If true, he probably knows this already and now just needs to work out how to fix it.

mupuff1234 2y ago

Reminds me of this Jim Carrey speech https://youtu.be/YHIZ0Rb7lv0?si=TG_SIi-XUuP1iHYf https://youtu.be/YHIZ0Rb7lv0?si=TG_SIi-XUuP1iHYf