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Time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world
- MeteorMarc 1y agoRutger Bregman is so witty, even if sometimes annoying too.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agoWorking an office job is such a profound waste of life. Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard, and with 6-9 months of work, can be achieved. Office jobs will be looked back on as slavery 2.0
- Ancalagon 1y agoDo tell??
- politelemon 1y ago> Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard, Do share.
- vaidhy 1y agoFor a very small set of people, it is true. For the rest of 99.99% of the world, it is impossible.
- grugagag 1y ago> Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard Does that require to have rich parents? Or rich friends that want to do business with you?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agowhat you think 10k a month is appealing to rich people?
- grugagag 1y agoOdd jobs for the rich, easy work, no competition and such. I actually know some people who do that..
- throaway1989 1y agoAll you need to do is have 5k worth of stuff you can sell every month?
- dreghgh 1y agoCan't wait for the society where everyone sits at home and lives off of online scams, rather than having to work.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agoits already more in this camp than people realize. also, established businesses are often a wrapper around a low value scam, where some minuscule aspect of the services they provide is actually essential
- rvz 1y ago> Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard, and with 6-9 months of work, can be achieved. Office jobs will be looked back on as slavery 2.0 This. Don't want to hear anymore excuses. It can be done. Now with AI, there will be even less jobs over time and likely a 10% increase in global unemployment in the next few decades or so. Have some ambition and make 10k a month on your own without sending CVs to AI recruiters.
- throaway1989 1y agoHow? I asked Copilot if it could code my game ideas (which would sell millions, obviously) and it said it could, but it was lying.
- esafak 1y agoOnly certain types of jobs can be done alone. Can you cure cancer on your own? And if you start a company and hire people, you're back to an office job :) Not all office jobs suck.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agoeven if your office job doesnt suck, its still a waste of life
- drewcoo 1y ago> Can you cure cancer on your own? Cancer is many, many things. It may not even be a thing we can "cure" together, whatever that means. We may as well ask if we can cure Mondays.
- esafak 1y agoIf ML solves all disease then it won't matter if it is many things. But that's beside the point.
- readthenotes1 1y agoMaking 10k/mn of lira may not be that hard, but 10k of USD, gbp, or Eur is definitely beyond the grasp of most people. Think about it. If everyone made $10k/month, the net value of that labor would have to increase about 10x over what it is now(1). I don't think that's an easy thing to do overnight. And then there would still be variety in the outcome because a lot of us are too slothful or too unconscientious to actually go out and do the necessary. And that's ignoring how hard it would be for those with no network or access (refugee living in a favela in Bogotá, dlavevin Mauretania) regardless of their ambition. (1)Https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agoif youre someone in an office job that makes 150-300k, you can probably make money online
- readthenotes1 1y agoThat's 10% of people in the USA (at the low end of incomes), less in most other countries. What's the answer for the other 90%?
- Artgor 1y ago> How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life. What if the work itself isn't "the most important" thing in the person's life?
- zdragnar 1y agoThen you get to join the 99% of the rest of humanity that views work as something necessary to enable the things they enjoy and find purpose in when they're not working. Finding purpose, fulfillment or joy in your work is nice, but as you grow as a human, or as the field you're in changes, or as the work dries up... well, you're left thoroughly adrift.
- Loughla 1y agoI work in education, a field famous for attracting people based on their own willingness to do good work for good reasons. And at the end of the day, a job is a job. I do it because it allows me to live a lifestyle close to what I want, while not being soul crushingly boring most of the time. I came to terms with the fact that I'm not going to change the world. The best I can do is not fuck it up anymore than when I got here. That's about as good as most of us can expect, since most of us are average in many aspects. Without stunning amounts of genius or resources, I think that hoping just to fade into obscurity is the best you can do, really.
- quicheshore 1y agoI feel this. I do think though, he mentions that this is the exact trap that is laid down for you when you enter society. You’re led to believe resources/genius is what separates do’ers, but I think he wants us to believe in the blind faith doing = progress. The other is option is doing nothing at all and succumbing to obscurity like you’re saying.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- iamsanteri 1y agoAmazing how we keep searching for meaning and purpose, a direction in our lives. I guess this is something eternal and universal.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- easeout 1y agoIt goes to show that the common system of employment, in which we spend our time toward the purposes and meanings of others, tends to provide no purpose or meaning for ourselves.
- Clubber 1y ago>It goes to show that the common system of employment, in which we spend our time toward the purposes and meanings of others, tends to provide no purpose or meaning for ourselves. Work certainly provides meaning, you'll notice this when you can't find work for a while, ie. involuntarily unemployed. Also, you have to find deeper meaning outside of work: church, social clubs, raising kids, taking care of elderly parents, volunteering, etc. Getting paid to do moral work is rarely a thing and somewhat defeats the purpose.
- dreghgh 1y ago> A full-time career consists of 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life. This just seems like a confusion to me. My job is the time I spend getting money to pay for the things I need to live. By definition, the work I do then is of value to someone paying me, but not to me. The rest of my time I spend doing things which I can choose, including things I think are a positive contribution to the world. I could make sense of arguments such as: 1. You should consume vastly less, so that you spend less time earning money and more time contributing to improving the world. 2. Society should be organised differently so that people have to work less and can contribute as they see best in their increased non-paid-work time. 3. You should spend a lower proportion of your free time doing things that benefit yourself and more doing things which benefit the world. But "you should spend the time you dedicate to getting food, clothes, energy and shelter to contributing to good causes?" Doesn't really make sense.
- gizmo 1y agoThat so misses the point. Not all work that pays contributes equally to society. Some jobs that pay well (because they are of value to the employer) are harmful to society as a whole. If you harm society for 40 or 50 hours every week you're not going to make up for that with an hour or two of volunteer work.
- xnickb 1y agoNot disagreeing, but if not me, someone else would probably do an even better job at that harmful position. Everyone is replaceable. When does this become about changing the society?
- dvdkon 1y agoI suppose making yourself more than an immediately replaceable cog in the machine is part of what the author is advocating, ideally in a societally beneficial position. Moreover, many businesses operate under the "everyone is replaceable" model, implicitly adding "without much effort", but that's not really true. There are plenty of examples of political movements that never recovered from their leader or figurehead leaving. You can't just take any other politician and swap them, their positions are too personal. That's an extreme example, but I think it applies to most job positions that aren't just about following checklists, in varying degrees.
- Treegarden 1y agoWho decides what is moral? For which moral causes are our contributions beyond a drop in the ocean? I can go work in a soup kitchen, but thats not gonna help thousands or millions of people in need. There is a structural reason why a certain fraction of society becomes in need of a soup kitchen. Can this not be applied to anything? War, famine, natural disasters, poor people that need a lawyer. All these are the result of structural reasons. Can these structural reasons be solved or are they part of the human condition, even part of nature? Manually helping 1+n people in this would not address the root cause. Try to do a scalable solution, but those are hard and I guess most that would wok have been tried. In my childhood I would have needed a tutor, my teachers where terrible. Yet it was not the tutors that would help me now, it was chatGPT. Should I now become a tutor, should I build a openAI competitor, or should I build tutuorAI? If I do marketing at tutorAI will this be a bullshit job? When I build an app, sooner or later I have to solve abstract array puzzles, solving these will make the app work. Work often becomes abstract. Does it mean its now bullshit? If everyone worked at the soup kitchen, would homelessness be solved?
- almosthere 1y agoJust you! It's not that complicated.
- jawns 1y agoThis is written from the perspective of someone who doesn't have dependents. I'm all about changing the world, but I also have an obligation to take care of my family, so my way of changing the world is working a traditional job, donating to charity from my earnings, and using my time/talent/treasure outside of work hours to make a difference.
- paddw 1y ago> Now, you might be thinking: that’s all well and good, but I’ve got a full-time job, two kids and a mortgage. I’m happy to recycle and eat some tofu now and then, but a “fundamental transformation”? No thanks. In that case, moral ambition may not be for you. I mean, once you have a labradoodle, a set of cheese knives or a robot mower, there’s generally no going back
- dreghgh 1y agoDid you have parents who looked after you when you were a child? Did they try to provide a reasonable standard of living for you? If so, do you wish that they hadn't done so?
- bradly 1y agoOof. Okay. I've done a lot of what is talked about in this article and I have three children. Is the implication that I'm doing something wrong?
- ptero 1y agoNo. The implication is that not everyone who chose a different path is a useless labradoodle and cheese knives owner.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThe ambitious, higher risk path for some, necessary, understandable obligation lower risk path for others. Life changes, and so too can these paths and risk tolerance for action.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoThe greatest force in human endeavor is self preservation. The next greatest force is self interest. The final force is altruism and moral ambition it is by far the weakest force. All three forces have different magnitudes and exist in all of us. Capitalism is a system that exploits the second force to the greatest extent and is responsible for economic changes in society that have far exceeded anything produced by altruism alone. Have there been societies and economies that exploit moral ambition? I don’t think here have been examples. To truly do good in this world we have to face our own nature. I’d rather be alive and rich before I do any favors for the world. So if you want me to change the world… first tell me what that gives me.
- arrosenberg 1y ago> Have there been societies and economies that exploit moral ambition? The Crusades seem like a good example.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoMorality is the cover story. Personal glory is the reality. But in the end soldiers are also getting paid and that’s the primary driver behind it.
- quicheshore 1y agoGreat read! I didn’t know about Clarkson at all. I know the article talks about all the evils in the world to choose to battle, I will say though as 21 year old it’s easier to be outraged rather than do something. The third category he mentions is what most of the world has become. One thing I did take away is belief in the power to change things is the basic requirement behind moral ambition. Something I intend to work on myself.
- webdoodle 1y agoI worked IT for over 25 years, and thanks to anti-social media, I now hate most internet technology because of the shitty rich people who use it to abuse the rest of us. I now only work when I have too, and devote the rest of my time to sharing what I've learned about Operation Mockingbird 2.0 and how it's being used to subjugate us all. If you really want to change the world, come protest with me at the Sun Valley Conference, AKA the Billionaires SummerCamp on July 6th. This event is where the parasitic rich coordinate the years propaganda, further consolidate there stranglehold on the industry, and train the new round of corporate newspapermen on what information needs to be throttled, distorted, derailed or deleted so that those same rich parasites can stay in power.
- almosthere 1y agoCandace Owens follower? It doesn't matter if not - I heard that from her.
- ptero 1y agoMany of such "do the right thing and change the world" pieces assume that most people mostly agree on what "the right thing" is. They do not. Pick people from different countries, different cultures, different backgrounds and they will have very different views on what would make things better. Not in the end state of "people should be healthy, happy and free to pursue their passions; and we should explore the stars, too", but in "what would be a worthy goal for me to work on, today and for the next few years". And acceptance of such differences is, to me, a good thing: anytime countries are remoralized into pursuing a common moral goal, gulags for those who did not drink the kool-aid are not far away. In my book people should not work on things they find immoral. But I am totally fine if my neighbors or my friends are competing against me at work, in technological or in moral space. If they do not consider their work immoral, it is all good. I like hearing their arguments, too, either to steelman my views or to find cracks in them. This likely puts me into the "spineless amoebas, useless species" bucket of the author's classification. Going on a moral crusade to change the world? No, thank you. They do not end well; not for the world, which likely will not even notice, but for the crusader who will likely become disillusioned, radicalized or bitter when the world does not budge. My 2c.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago> "that most people mostly agree on what "the right thing" is. They do not." Do people agree on basic math, physics, chemistry, etc or it depends on different countries/cultures/backgrounds? > "Going on a moral crusade to change the world? No, thank you. They do not end well; not for the world, which likely will not even notice, but for the crusader who will likely become disillusioned, radicalized or bitter when the world does not budge. My 2c." Your choices are yours, as are your 2c, but the rest neither follows nor computes. What follows from your logic is that serfdom and slavery are perfectly fine, you wouldn't bother to find a better way if they were imposed on you or others... but you would ride on the efforts of others while criticizing their actions as "moral crusade to change the world".
- DavidPiper 1y ago> Do people agree on basic math, physics, chemistry, etc or it depends on different countries/cultures/backgrounds There are many people in the world who cannot practice basic maths, physics, or chemistry, etc. [1] is one source for the USA, which puts the number at 39% for Grade 8 students in maths, which would suggest higher for physics and maybe chemistry. So the answer is probably "no" for the USA at least. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-students-perform-at-basic-math-and-reading/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-students-perform-at...
- spicyusername 1y agoIt's discussions like these that make romanticizing our non-agrarian ancestors so easy. Before the agricultural and industrial revolutions and our correct system of highly specialized labor, it feels as though everyone just hung out together, having a good time, and doing what was needed to feed the tribe. Minus the disease and war, of course. There wasn't this need for an existential discussion about this job or that job, or whether you're lifestyle was morally justified. There weren't power structures that existed on a scale larger than a single community, invisibly guiding everyone's lives in ways they couldn't control.
- lenkite 1y agoIn the romantic, non-agrarian era, People very regularly bonked each other with clubs over the head - esp those of a different community.
- buzzerbetrayed 1y ago> Minus the disease and war, of course.
- lenkite 1y agoI doubt they even considered it war - merely the price of living.
- kadushka 1y agoPeople do this today - all over the world, only with missiles and automatic rifles.
- int_19h 1y agoWhen you look at the percentage of people involved in it and people who die to it, we're actually better off than pretty much ever before, even accounting for our vastly improved and devastating weaponry, and even when you look at massive conflicts like WW1 and WW2. Thing is, a pre-agrarian society means hunters/gatherers, and for that to work out, you need quite a lot of land to provide for a single person (hence why those societies have such low population density). Thus, warfare in that era is all about directly reducing the number of people competing with you for those precious resources, either by killing them or by driving them off the land. And so pretty much all males are involved in it and regular mortality rates from constantly ongoing warfare can reach as high as 20%. Furthermore, warfare itself is explicitly genocidal in nature, e.g. raids of enemy villages, ideally while defenders are away so that you can slaughter as many as possible.
- adverbly 1y agoIncredibly well written. Do yourself a favour and actually read the article this time. It is very convincing for me personally, and it's got me considering making some big changes.
- almosthere 1y agoIf all non profits went back to doing the mission instead of selling the mission then we'd all be happier at minimum.
- everdrive 1y agoI think the author is confused about just how few jobs provide value to society. Individuals can pivot and take more meaningful positions, but this isn't possible en masse. Even if everyone were will to make bigger sacrifices, there just are not actually that many available jobs that are beneficial.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoYes, there aren't many jobs where you get to change the World. Go make your own, where you actually do. Why are we all here, on this specific site, if we're not interested in building something ambitious and shaped on our own ideals of what we think the World needs? We might not be right, but it's each of ours, individually. The people playing this game and winning at the moment are ambitious, but morally... I think we're starting to have some questions about their big ideas, more recently... and so you have the option: go do something to change the game and take the attention away from them. Big changes come from small ones. If you don't like the status quo, figure out how to change it by building something better. And yes, it's hard, but you don't need to solve the whole thing, particularly when getting started, just a small corner of it.
- dreghgh 1y agoAgreed. I don't exclude the possibility of large scale changes in society, but until that day, maybe 20% of people who need to work to eat and pay bills can do genuinely valuable work. I'm sure many of the other 80% would like to do something more positive. Should we really be trying to start a culture war between the two groups, rather than acknowledge that the system isn't great for anyone?
- martindbp 1y agoThe problem is "Greatness Cannot Be Planned". There are not many cases where someone ambitious sets out to make the world a better place in a very direct way, who actually accomplished that, because of deceptive objectives. Nobody would have predicted that something as frivolous as PC gaming would lead to the AI boom we're having now, but it did. In many ways, John Carmack did more good by kickstarting the PC graphics race than any morally ambitious do-gooder has ever done. There is one notable exception, and that is Elon Musk. He attacked two extremely difficult industries head on armed only with $100m and grandiose plans, yet somehow made it work by shear force of will. Difficult to replicate, and of course we all hate him now. Better probably to do what you find interesting, and maybe it will lead to greatness. If it didn't at least you did something interesting.
- disambiguation 1y agoYes the tech industry is really lacking people who want to "change the world." But its an interesting thought exercise. Slavery seems like a cut and dry issue in terms of harm and human rights, yet overtime the "easy" moral problems are solved and you're left with the gray ones. What's today's moral equivalent of slavery that we need crusaders against?
- DavidPiper 1y agoFor Category IV people out there, I think the key takeaway from the whole article is actually in an almost throwaway phrase down the bottom: > One evening, at a dinner with a few other abolitionists, ... Category IV success is only achievable in groups or teams. And our education and capital systems, as well as our social and media systems, are increasingly pushing us towards more isolation: - University graduates get earn more money with lower risk in consulting or finance than entrepreneurship (highlighted in the article) - High level academia is basically an independent game from my understanding, with some exceptions like some security labs where the same people consistently work together - Business structures tend to be designed for maximum specialisation and work extraction of the individual, not teams - Third spaces are disappearing outside of work and home - In-person relationships are being replaced with social media relationships and parasocial fandoms - Politics is being replaced with drama > But if that’s irritating to hear – and I imagine it might be – then by all means, prove me wrong. I have learned that there are always exceptions, and I want to show that you can be that exception. It’s never too late to step up. It seems the author may not be aware of this though, and ultimately just ends up selling a different brand of individualist grindset.