The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves.
The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Those living in the first world have been shielded from that harsh reality for some time, but it's starting to show up on our doorstep and we don't like it, and due to our inexperience with it we haven't learned how to adapt to it.
It scares me too, but I refuse to be in denial about it.
The Cracked article comes from a very neoliberal, self-optimization hustle-grind culture: work on yourself so you're worth more for others: an incredibly, if not exclusively, extrinsic motivation. While OPs article seems more focused on your internal presence, your relationships and being with people, not for people. Cracked says to work hard and complain less, produce more so your skillset is more worthy to other people. OPs article says to practice presence and true connection.
The only thing I can find that connects both is that they have a mindset of anti-passivity, but that's all.
Ahh, edit: thought you replied directly to OP, that's why I thought you meant that the Cracked article is similar to OPs article. Sorry!
There's some truth in there about in case of a serious emergency you mostly need competence over empathy. But, to me, it's always love, empathy and connectedness that wins. Why are you commenting on HN? Is it for bringing value in return for money or services or material goods? I don't think so. It is about human connection. In absence, life or death makes not much difference anymore.
That's not insightful, that's just circular reasoning, and it fails to explain normal human behavior.
Does a child have no value to it's parents because it's "easily produced"[1] and "disposable and replaceable"?
[1] I imagine OP has never given birth
In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.
But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.
We go back to "fair" very fast.
You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.
...which is what exactly? My best guess is that you're implying "normal human behavior" is unconditional love and support? That's an idealistic view that doesn't hold true for everyone (even in the first world) as GP pointed out.
I think this idealistic type of mindset, which seems to be a collective agreement to blow smoke up each other's asses, has done a lot more harm than good. You get thrashed between the reality that everything is conditional and the ideal which is that you're unique and special just by existing, with the latter being delusion IMO.
But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.
And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.
It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.
Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingenuous.
To your friends and family as well? Or just your employer?
You're describing things that may well be true for a lot of employers, but fall apart outside of that context.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
By the time I reached adult hood I only experienced a handful of deaths of close people, all from old age.
Maybe this was Diogenes's observation.
A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
But if you are even allowed to grow up and become an individual, things might be somewhat better once you are part of the in-group, but that does not factor in the fact that human empathy has an overall tendency to switch off if you're not. Even if you're loved because you're kin, your neighboring tribe might still kill you, or you and your kin might kill them, for entirely petty or cynical reasons. The prehistoric bone record supports this as well, seemingly human-weapon related reasons is the most common cause of death.
You can also examine your own emotions to get some idea of our evolutionary environment. Loneliness hurts, to the point where it has measurable negative health impacts equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Your brain is screaming at you not to be lonely, but why? Well, in our ancestral environment, being excluded from the social group meant death, so most individuals that did not have a profound and visceral fear of that happening got their genes consistently removed from the gene pool. For loneliness to be that big of deal, being excluded must have been an easily available option. If everyone loved and accepted everyone unconditionally, this emotional state would simply not have evolved.
Humans quickly become extremely brutal once the environment necessitates it, up to and including cannibalizing your own kin. Infanticide and murder of both ingroups and outgroups is historically commonplace because it was also commonplace prehistorically. Even modern tribes, that live in relative abundance, are still brutal in many ways to this very day.
But of course, when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy. But you might want to check the skeletons in the cave before you pick that as your conclusion.
That's a nice sentiment, but do you have sources for the claim that tribes universally "loved" non-productive members just because they were kin?
But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.
Indeed it seems that there really are two "modes" for human civilization; one where human beings are scarce and valuable, and one where they are abundant and cheap. The West has spent the last 400+ years in the former mode, as the plague decimated Europe and they spread into the vast new world, where humans were so scarce they had to be forcibly imported via mass enslavement, and wage earners could demand a premium. Now that globalism has brought us all onto the same stage as the Eastern masses, things are starting to feel pretty crowded.
It is other way round. The sort of person who sees themselves as their job only are good when they are well off.
That sort of person copes badly with when being poor. Having no self to draw from outside of work and feeling like constant failure in unsatisfying work leads to issues like alcoholism, violence, gambling.
This is only true if by "value" you mean monetary value. Your personality and humanity may not be valuable to the person paying you to do your job, it still has value for the people around you.
Apologies for the long-winded context, but I think it's important to address your point. You're alluding to some kind of intrinsic, self-evident value, and I would like to challenge you on that. Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can. You might value a person in a certain way, but you can't ensure everyone else does. In fact you even accept this in your last sentence. A small group of people known to that individual would value them more than the other 8 billion people on the planet. Which is more or less what the person you replied to was explaining.
I realized this first when I travelled Latin America as a young person. It was quite surprising to me never to get asked about my job but often about a family thousands of kilometers away and without any chance for the stranger speaking to me to ever meet any of them.
Only if you see yourself defined by the friends and family that surround you it suddenly makes sense.
Not valuable to what or whom?
> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Disposable and replaceable to what or whom?
The Planet doesn’t care whether we exist. But then again the planet would not need to replace us either. So what could this be about?
Only humans want or need automation of human labor. Are there then some special kind of humans that are entitled to (by might or other means) the output of the “disposable humans”?
Something like 360-380 thousand births every day. We’re insignificant even just compared to the delta.
Eventually Jack London writes Call of the Wild and becomes stupidly rich.
Was Jack London the famous author, living off of all the money (writing less popular stories, like White Fang) more valuable because of all the money he made? Was Jack London the hobo less valuable because he didn't write the bestseller Call to the Wild yet?
Or maybe, the entire concept of valuing people off a monetary lens is just bullshit.
In German we have a word called "Zweckoptimismus" that would translate to purposeful optimism. It is the optimism of someone who knows the world isn't good, but accepting it as bad would make it even worse, so you operate under a defiant optimism without ignoring the reality of the world.
Don't let capitalism do this to you. Not everything with value is paid in this system, only things which make the buyer more money.
To pick one mere point where you might have chosen to value life otherwise:
> They're not a rare thing like say, gold.
You mean the gold that's a relatively common chemical in the universe? You're comparing the elementary particle formed by astronomical processes to somethings which (even if metaphorically) exists only within organisms so complex we have yet to find signs of similar complexity in the universe.
What you say is cold, but hardly truth.
Perhaps we're immensely valuable - sparks of divinity. Perhaps we're not - mere bags of sentient meat.
I don't know which of those statements is more true. Either/neither/both?
> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing
> like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it
> on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable
> as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.
On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.
But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."
Just my 2¢
we are, but that doesn't mean we're not valuable. everything is disposable, everything is replacable.
the idea that an individual human life isn't very valuable and that it's only first-worlders that have trouble understanding that is projection. that is the modern, first world (read capitalist) view of human life. you think you're thinking but you're actually regurgitating the ideology you've received.
for the op, it might not define you but it does define you for others.
Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job is the examined life. It what makes life worth living.
We should be incredibly skeptical of a social system whose default is to have individuals primary identify by the work they do. That necessarily sets people up for continuous identity foreclosure and psychic famine in a self re-enforcing feedback loop.
Frankly it's cringe to primarily identify by profession.
Much of human behavior is not explained by economic incentives: for example, many elderly people are cared for by their children out of a love or a sense of familial duty.
Religion has varied continuously throughout human existence. Its not the foundational requirement here.
As an older Black guy I’ve seen how both corporate America works and religious institutions. I’ve seen much less discrimination in the former than the latter.
Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.
We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.
And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).
But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.
On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.
But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.
Gerasimov? Is it you?
Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.
So your respectful challenge seems to be missing the point. Your beliefs are not challenged here. But you cannot change how other people value you.
You've clearly never been through childbirth. Women go through incredible amounts of pain, and good parents make incredible sacrifices for their kids. They're not doing that because they're guaranteed some payoff.
Wait until you get to the part of philosophy that hinges on this being an invention of our own making. Human beings have decided that human beings are disposable. Just like we decided that gold was valuable (and to many, more valuable).
There is a definite economic value to it. What does not is your consioisness that you experience since nobody else can use it.
yikes
True, but losing your job is still a big deal. It often means that you lose your income, your health insurance (in the US at least), many (if not most) of your daily interactions with other people, and your social status.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
They say this to a group of people that often struggles with all of these but still have managed to make a living off of solving technical problems in the past. Don't worry, you can just fall back on your famously great people skills!
That's a people skills problem, believe it or not. At the very least, it's a philosophical problem.
> As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
Um. Yes. There's a link on "other things". It's to a site for a bike tour. The author seems to be implying they don't really need a job.
I still remember hearing a group of homeless people near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market in SF talking about the days when they used to be printers. That was, for several hundred years, a stable, well-paying job.
Depending on the economic conditions for the year, it can still take months:
> To illustrate the recent trajectory: one analysis found that in January 2023 it took job seekers 268 days on average to land a job offer, whereas by August 2024 this had improved to 182 days (about 6 months) (How Long Does it Take to Find a Job in 2024?). Another dataset focusing on tech jobseekers showed a similar trend – those in 2024 took about 247 days on average to secure a “good” job, down from 281 days in 2023.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/average-job-search-time-tech-...
Being fired from his own company completely destroyed him - and not because he's worried about the financial aspect, he doesn't need to worry about that at this point.
I remember watching him go though this and thinking to myself "Jeeze, I'm glad my identity isn't completely tied up with what I do for work".
With AI knocking on the door I'm surprised how much my identity and perceived self-worth is actually tied to being a "good" developer. But it's more of a slow burner than what my father in law got. So I at least have some time to mentally prepare for my new reality.
Me personally I'm just not wired like that. I work hard only to get to that payoff of being lazy and carefree later. I don't actually like being in this stressful state. It bewilders me frankly that some seemingly are addicted to it. Maybe they literally are, considering flight or flight response is a real measured altering of neurotransmitters.
> I'm Jacob - I run Sancho Studio a software consulting studio - I write about cryptography, craft, and human experience.
Basically opening with who they are as defined by their job.
Ok that's cool and all but many of us have bills to pay. Bike trips don't pay the bills. Software people have been economically advantaged up until now that they can go and do stuff like that.
The issue isn't losing my job. Many of us could deal with that by simply finding another similar job in the same (coding) industry. The issue is losing the entire industry.
That thing you spent years becoming good at? Getting paid lots of money for? Oh, we killed it. Start over and pick something else. You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market. Oh, and yes, it'll require massive life adjustment on your part. Good luck!
UBI has problems that far as I know haven't been addressed. Vast numbers of people no longer being occupied doesn't seem like it would lead to a healthy society. And how do you uphold democracy when the government is effectively handing out the paychecks?
This strikes me as wildly optimistic. People aren't going to be able to live on UBI at a level where massive political and social unrest is averted unless it's like $2k per person per month, minimum. And I'm skeptical that the US government is going to start printing $8.5 trillion dollars of UBI in the next decade.
UBI makes it even harder to find people for that kind of jobs. Not paying any social benefits and increasing the pressure on the unemployed to take these jobs is much more interesting for everyone that is not unemployed. Please don't judge me for writing this. It's the feeling I have, not my view.
And then re-distribute to each person accordingly. That ain't happening, no govt will be willing to try that, and rich won't let that happen, they will become slightly rich from very rich. that just ain't happening.
I get your point but what about a step before that - since when is that anyone's goal? From a sociopathic leader perspective, vast populations are only great for armies and tech has surpassed the need for raw manpower at that scale (and the AI you fear would make militaries require even fewer people).
In your AI scenario is it more likely the ruling class gives everyone free living standard or just lets like 40% of the population die? If all the leaders get together this is the ideal outcome for them -- vast power and control without enough civilians to rise up, climate change becomes easy to reverse with vastly lower power and food needs, and reduced threat of global war because nobody has an occupying size army anymore. This is like the new version of "mutually assured destruction" as a strategy for global peace. I can't speak for the world but I can imagine some of the twisted folks currently in power in the US seeing this route as their destiny and simply them doing the best thing for humanity as a whole -- longtermists are in, nazis know a final solution when they see one, and Christians are honored to have the duty of bringing forth the second coming.
I've known people for decades without knowing what their job is, or I only have a vague idea about their job. It's not important for people here. The person itself is important. There are other things than the job which define the person. I know this sounds very strange for Americans, but, in fact, the strangeness is the other way around.
I'm not sure that I can say "I am not my job" [mostly because I actually very much enjoy what I do there], but I can definitely say "you are not your job". Because I don't even know your job, nor do I much care.
I guess if you live in a community where most people do sort of menial interchangeable jobs then it's probably different, maybe everyone has a job as an unfortunate necessity but would rather think and talk about it as little as possible.
All around the world, even people in the lower income brakets take vacation. Sometimes they travel if they can, sometimes they don't.
Working until you wear off is mostly a US thing.
Can you share some area(s) it's not like that, and what kinds of introductions/opening conversations you do have? I'd like to replicate that into my own social life (in North America) if only to bend the arc ever so slightly.
But I'm not actually that good at getting small talk going (not do I particularly enjoy small talk), so I'm not the best person to ask about introductions. So it basically boils down to exchanging names, and, for me, sometimes about nationality, and then about whatever happens at the place we're meeting up (say, an event of some kind). And from then on we kind of figure out the other person's interests. Starting to talk about the job would be.. very dry. Negative. As if there's nothing to talk about, at all.
It wasn't always like this. Parents used to have more hobbies. Maybe dad was a bowler. Maybe mom was in a gardening club. Where was the kid? With the village of course: grand parents, baby sitter, playing with other kids in the neighborhood.
Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.
Maybe you wish to be more than your working self. That’s honorable and desirable. Just declaring it isn’t going to cut it though.
I retired a few years ago, and I believe and insist that I am very much the same person.
To see a person only as what they do at work seems awfully limiting. Even when I was working, I was also a sailor, musician, woodworker, home brewer, cat person, chess player, leather guy, and a good number of other things. And yes, even after retiring, I am still a computer guy. I even like hobby coding projects more than I did.
And you are what you do for other people.
Besides providing support and entertainment for our friends and families, the concrete things we do that bring value to society are through our jobs.
Society doesn't run on hanging out or hobbies.
This concept goes hand in hand with...
(oh, to say nothing of the many years of your life dedicated to developing this vocation through school and training or whatever. So it’s not just hours of the day; it’s years of your life that revolve around developing this vocation. It’s deeply disingenuous to suggest that it’s possible to separate yourself meaningfully from your vocation. Frankly, it’s insulting—to suggest that such separation is possible or even preferable, or to judge people for failing to separate their vocation from their identity when it’s impossible.
It makes me think of some of the impossible requirements placed on women: that they not be too slutty while at the same time not wearing a hijab or being too conservative. They get pressure from both sides, and there’s very little space, if any, that goes unjudged or unremarked upon. Having children too early, too late, or not at all—women will get flack from one corner of society or another. Likewise, workers get flack for overidentifying with their vocation, but it’s really impossible to extricate ourselves from it. For that reason, I find the whole idea offensive.)
...this concept of not making friends at work—or of distinguishing between your “work friends” and your “real friends.”
People tell me, “Your manager is not your friend. Your co-workers are not here to be your friends. You shouldn’t expect loyalty from them.” And okay, I get that. I understand the economic realities; I’ve had co-workers say things like, “Hey, I agree with you on this one, but I have a mortgage. I have kids in college. So I’m not going to speak up. I’m not going to join you in this complaint or in this effort to improve working conditions.”
I understand there are real economic constraints on the friendships, the loyalty, and the relationships that we establish in the office. I’ve also had co-workers who were loyal, empathetic, caring, honest, earnest—decent, good people—and they were groomed for management in a way that basically meant that once a week they’d be taken into a room and grilled about everyone else’s behavior. They were made into unwilling spies, and that has a chilling effect on the depth of friendships you can create. What’s tragic about that is, as I said at the start, because so much of our lives are dedicated to our vocation, the fact that we cannot establish meaningful, trusting, loyal relationships—that we’re forced to snitch on and betray one another—is a stunning, fundamental, disgusting injustice.
It’s an enormous violation of human liberties and possibilities. It is an utterly debased compromise that we’ve made as a society, one that wrecks us. It is a deeply troubling flaw in our foundation—that the majority of our hours, days, and years are dedicated to an environment where mutual trust and free association are fundamentally compromised.
Of course, that's a ride inaccessible to rest of us plebs, but it's nonetheless insightful to see what that ticket buys.
More like 15% of you work from home for a small company and shut the fuck up about wanting to be a career man. If you're not a homo consumator and play your cards right that's enough to check out of the corporate life before 45
Well I think it's nothing more than a social norm, and an easy one to avoid at that. People are mostly asking what's your job because that's a standard icebreaker.
Since I (mostly) recovered from burnout, and learnt that I'm actually not my job, I took the habit to never automatically ask people what is their job, at least not for ice breaking.
You can talk about their hobbies, their kids, their tastes ... because those are the real topics that will define if you bond or not anyway. And yes some people sometimes do have an interesting job that is worth talking about but when it happens, you will inevitably talk about it anyway.
You have that backwards though! :-)
We'd get to know people in our community, often because they were born in to it, then we'd fit in to productive roles.
The way we do it these days is a recent, post industrial revolution, mode of society.
I’ll add that if you see your colleagues as anything else than primarily working for money, you’re a bit delusional unless you know for a fact they could not work for the rest of their lives and be financially fine. Of course there are other reasons to work than money, but the way the system is set up you’re not supposed to care more about them than about cold hard cash.
I worked in tech, because I love tech. No other reason, really. I accepted a job, making maybe half of what I could make, elsewhere, because of the personal satisfaction I got from it, and the relationships I made, there.
When I retired, I have continued to develop software, and am currently “leaning into” AI-assisted development.
During that time, I’ve also had plenty of time to be human.
“Do what you love for work, and you'll stop loving it" seems more true to me. It always eventually turns into a chore once it is a thing you need to do.
I write software in my spare time, for fun, as it scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I also enjoy a lot of other hobbies as well: woodworking, car repair, boating, beekeeping...
Having a 9 to 5 desk job in any field is it's own type of soul crushing, even moreso as of late for myself personally. However, if I need to perform the song and dance to support my family, I'll at least do it to the tune of something I enjoy. With software engineering I can at least "get lost in" the work, so the drudgery can be temporarily forgotten until I can get home to my family and side projects.
On the one hand, I think a lot of the ruinous parts are the extra things it forces beyond the parts you actually love. So the problem there is you are actually doing a bunch of things you don't love, so do "work" some portion of your day.
The other is that many of us do love a bit of oppositional defiance. Doing what is demanded of us by others is definitely not doing what we love in that respect!
One of my kids has taken this advice, does art (really good art) for themselves and is pursuing a STEM career instead. The other is pursuing a game dev career, despite every current and former dev in his life warning him off for the last fifteen years. To quote Kissing Jessica Stein, “OY! This child will suffer.”
I haven't really stopped loving writing and designing software. I still have fun writing code and coming up with clever optimization tricks. The thing that has become draining is the actual act of "having a job".
Obviously I'm grateful to have an income, and I like my coworkers, but the problem with most jobs is that the part I enjoy like ends up being a relatively small part of my day. When I worked for a BigCo there would be weeks at a time where at least half of my day is eaten by meetings and/or emails, and when you do get to work on something technical it's usually not something that's challenging or interesting. A lot of the work ends up being a bugfix or an incremental feature that really doesn't require a lot of thought.
Even startups aren't immune to this. With startups you have the advantage of not being nearly as siloed, but that comes with the double-edged sword of being stuck working on parts of the company or stack that you don't really care about. I deal with fewer meetings but I spend much more time fighting with Kubernetes YAML configurations which I find unbelievably draining, which I might have been able to avoid if I stayed at BigCo.
From 2016-2018, I worked at a MediumCo, where I was able to primarily focus on designing and writing distributed software. I was able to spend a good chunk of time figuring out how to optimize concurrent software, there weren't that many meetings, and I didn't get sick of it at all. I quit that job because I had a romanticized idea of what life at BigCo would be like; if I had the ability to see the future I would have stayed at MediumCo because I didn't like working at BigCo [1].
Anyway, my point is that given my experience, if you can actually work on the things you love, and not just a bunch of ancillary bullshit, I think it's possible you can continue to enjoy it forever. The problem is that most jobs simply aren't like that.
[1] Usual disclaimer; you might be able to dig through my history and figure out who BigCo and MediumCo are in this, and that's obviously fine, but I politely ask that you don't post the proper nouns here.
I knew some airline pilots who loved flying, but didn't feel so much like it after decades.
I got into aerospace engineering because I liked all aspects of it. A couple decades of end-to-end meetings and "TPS reports" later, I'm not as passionate anymore. Some time ago I was excited about solving a practical issue by coding some new tool myself, a year of exchanges with management and IT has made me look forward to move on.
By all measures my company is pretty good in my industry, but the corporate life just has a way of sucking away passion.
But I have to say that as I grow older, I like less and less the tech my boss makes me work on. And that applies to perhaps the majority of potential bosses out there.
It's possible sex workers took this advice too literally...
I'm reminded of the story of the great manga artist Tezuka Osamu, who, as he was dying of stomach cancer in a hospital bed at the end of his life, begged to be given a pencil to let him continue his work. Granted, not everyone is Tezuka. But many people have work they care greatly about accomplishing, even at the end of their lives.
In America there's pressure to "be a success" and it's not easy to get away from. If you're successful it's a virtue and if you're a "loser" it's because you're lazy or something bad. Bums sleeping on the street don't deserve a place to live even in the richest country in the world because losers need to be punished and winners should not be taxed unfairly.
Where I'm from in Zimbabwe, foreigners including my parents always misunderstood the importance of age - the need to show respect to older people no matter what you think of their utterances. Every 2 seconds I could see other immigrants like myself rubbing Shona people up the wrong way by not understanding where the power lay and what people were proud of.
When I was in Turkey with my wife I realised it was another place where older people held a huge amount of power and the whole country operated differently from Britain - where one only has to be able to get a mortgage to be independent and tell one's parents to go to hell. In Turkey you have to kowtow to your parents and uncles and aunts because you're probably living in a flat that one of them owns until you're quite late in life.
It's not that "success" doesn't matter everywhere but that there are multiple priorities and it's not a pure indication of status. Quite often it's about family or not being of "the other" tribe.
As for thinking you're defined by your job, that is just part of the "pigeon-holing" process by which people try to understand you quickly and sometimes attempt to neutralise a perceived competitor socially. I don't think there's much you can do other than not buy into it yourself and not practise it yourself.
Gradually, we are succeeding.
This leaves us with two options:
a) Decouple the value of human life from economic output
b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero
Too counter-cultural and anti-money for today’s young people, I think. Everyone’s trying to make it, not drop out of society.
Also there's no such thing as "counterculture" in a world where culture isn't manufactured and controlled by some central authority. When there was only physical media and a few tv stations, "culture" was a fixed point one could obviously align with or against. Today in the post-internet non cultural milieu, anti-capitalist and anti-work ideals are everywhere but they just don't stand out the way the hippies did back in the day.
A new movement ? What a great opportunity to create and sell cheap merch, turning it into a joke.
When everything in life is about money and profit, we lose our humanity.
Take a look at the "cultural leaders" of kids these days. It is disheartening.
We don't make a big deal of our jobs because we are stupid - it's the society that assigns this or that income to this or that job, and income determines lifestyle or in worst case the survival.
The increased productivity is pretty much entirely coming from AI researchers and the companies investing in huge amounts of GPUs, and they are the ones receiving most of the windfalls, how's that not fair?
Think about a friend, what is it you like about them? I think you will find that it's not a series of attributes, but a rather unquantifiable them ness - you like the fact they are uniquely them, this is how you are seen as well. You're enough.
> I can't delegate my capacity to sit with someone when they're confused or scared or just need to feel known
Plenty of people rely on therapists and/or chat bots to listen to them. Not everybody feels comfortable burdening their friends and family with their problems.
> We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to
There is a trade-off between social services in a broad sense and the ability to pay for them. The stronger the social safety net, the more people at the margin will choose to work less, earn less, make less of an effort. In turn, the tax base becomes smaller, and thus unable to maintain those same social services.
For example, the vast majority of people choose to retire once they reach the age where they are able to collect enough from their pension that they no longer need to work in order to get by. If we lowered the age of eligibility by a year, most people would retire a year earlier. Just like we see people retiring later in countries that have moved the eligibility to the age of e.g. 67.
With this I am not advocating to increase or decrease the current social safety net in whichever region you, dear reader, are living. I am simply pointing out some of the real-world effects of moving the needle in one direction or another.
Thus, yes, in rich countries we have collectively decided that "caring for everyone" is not the best way forward, because we see that it becomes unsustainable when you go too far. Where exactly we place the needle varies from place to place, obviously. Thinning the social safety net too far also has massive societal and economic consequences.
Part of the problem is that the current system doesn't provide a great way to taper off, at least not by default. I suspect there would be a lot more people who'd keep working if it was simple to get a comparable job at 30 hours per week 25 weeks out of the year. But for those who are traditionally employed instead of contracting, the choice is often between full time or nothing.
What rich country are you talking about? Most developed countries have elected to have social safety nets, and that includes the US to some extent. "Caring for everyone" in your message looks like some form of utopia where no one would have to work, but that has never been advocated anywhere.
Also what does "we" mean in that context? To me, it looks like you’re passing your opinion as a well-accepted fact.
Well, sometimes.
At other times, the assessment may be based on signalling, tribalism, perception of status, personal connections, career connections, transactional goals, or other criteria.
Some people don't have or can't show warmth. Or they don't have the ability to "crack a joke at the right time" or make small talk. Should that be held against people when making assessments?
It shouldn't but it does.
> The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present.
This feminization of society is concerning.
Sure you don't want to be corporate slave. But a man's native instinct is to achieve great things, push the boundaries, achieve fame.
"Be loved for what you are" is not how it works in the real world. Well not for men at least.
People on this site will sing praises of bellards and torvalds and knuths and bernsteins of the world, long after they're gone. For a man's deeds and heroism are his identity.
That's probably why every ancient Indo-European society fixated on heroism, renown of one's self and progeny.
We might today think of them as violent primitive pastoralists who didn't have the talk therapy like the tiktok teens from US of A.
But they understood something we don't.
You're not your job, surely. But you're your deeds. You're the children you raise. You're the society you create.
I don't care to spend my time worrying about the manliness of the things I value or strengthening the strictures that narrow the possibilities in my life. Ends that arise out of ego, like fame, are fleeting and not worth pursuing in my book.
You are not your job. Do not put your ego in what you do. That’s something I discuss a lot during my 1:1s.
I am a tester. I’ve been a tester for 39 years. I’ll be a tester until I die, whether or not anyone pays me for it. At some point, you believe I am going to… collapse or something?
I have been burned out. Before I was a tester, I was a video game developer. I didn’t get the vitamins from that for the nourishment of my soul, and I DID collapse. In my experience, burnout has nothing to do with ego investment. It has to do with forcing one’s self to do something that isn’t a fit.
Once I learned about staying within my limits, I ceased having trouble with burnout. It had nothing to do with investing my identity into my chosen work.
BTW, I am a tester. I am also a father, a husband, an American, a philosopher, and a teacher. All these things are in me. As I turn 60, I am also beginning to embrace a new identity: old man.
https://danielkeogh.com/blog/post/On%20not%20being%20miserab...
I can only recommend people going through these phases to treat it (seriously) like any midlife crisis. You can't sweep it under the carpet. Carl Jung has written a lot about those, start there.
(5 years deep into mine, and the timing of the AI revolution certainly made my quest much more difficult than I would have wished)
you live to play video games and watch movies, but you make a living by working
To me, that describes for me a human capability that is often overlooked but is in fact at our core. All the rest is almost futile in comparison.
I really don’t think this is true
Architects needn't be diminished by CAD. Teachers needn't be diminished by internet access / computers. Nurses/Doctors needn't be diminished by new detection techniques or medicines.
No matter the era, we should carry the identity that we're not the tools we use, we're more than that.
I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the world we've built and all I can do is cope with it as those in power work on replacing me.
My point: You job does define you because, for the vast majority of people, one's job dictates where and how you live. It is a rarefied elite that can so easily disconnect their work from their outside lives. Tell a farmer about work-life balance when if he sleeps in, animals will suffer. Tell a cop that her doing graveyard shifts wrestling drunk people doesn't dictate the flow of her daily life. Tell a soldier that moving home ever other year doesn't impact his long-term social connections. Normal people have long been defined by their jobs, and it still holds today. Calling out such ties as unenlightened or to be avoided sticks a finger in the eye of the billions for whom their job is their life.
> The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present. You don't extract a conversation and then disappear.
As I get older (and, I hope, wiser), this matters more and more. Jobs come and go (and how many have gone), money comes and goes (rather too quickly), time comes and goes (progressively faster, if I might add), but what matters more than anything else is the people in your life who stick by you, and who you stick by.
The nattering nabobs of negativism will disagree (and there are plenty in the comments). I dont care.
I agree with the poster.
@jyrio - let's do a bagel + coffee in NYC. I'll be there the last week of April
No, it is 100% about the fear of losing a job due to companies replacing skilled people with AI.
https://youtu.be/NR1g30pQi4I?t=106s
Yes, it's true one needs to eat, have a roof over one's head, etc. Of course you can even like what you do, make friends at work. But never forget the nature of the relationship. It won't love you back.
Not being a software developer. That's actually generally a net negative, socially. It was all about class.
I've been fairly upwardly mobile. That alone gave me a feeling of success that glossed over any other inadequacies. Being comfortably financially also means - or meant - that I had the luxury of ignoring the reality of daily life for most people I met, however much I thought I hadn't lost touch.
Confronting the idea of how I'd feel about my life without it, and how the people in my life would feel about me, and how I feel about people who don't have the same comfort, is an instrumental part of me developing into a better, happier person.
Illusory Truth Effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
The narrative is being built that AI has already won, somewhat AGI, replaced jobs. It's sneaking into blogs and articles which are not even about AI, which makes it even harder to notice.
I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world? Because in this one, if you don't have labor worth buying or anyone to buy it, you don't eat.
You're likely to hear this sentiment from rich and privileged SV entrepreneurs and people who were handed six-figure salaries right out of school, and who have never had a realistic view of how most people live. People who only continue to work to satisfy their intellect and lifestyle.
You don't hear this sentiment from normal people.
No matter how irreplaceable you are, If you get sick or die, you will be replaced in 1-2 weeks. In 2-3 months, you will be forgotten...
No, it's just the fear of loosing your mind because you're broken. It's just about money and survivability. There's no room for ego when you don't even know if you will have food to provide for your kids next month
I agree but I don't hold such a positive view of the result of this (anymore) as the author do.
(I think?) in the book The End of Burnout, an argument is put forward about how our change in work culture is contributing to burnout. One aspect of it being that with the service economy, part of the value we provide in return for salary is not just our skills but a pleasant "persona". In previous times, our work used to be less socially oriented: farmers farm, craftmans craft, factory workers do line work. Social interaction happened ofc but wasn't as much the core for many professions. With increased automation, the social component got more important. These days it's not even surprising for many craftmans to also work close to customers or other group of people in an organization, increasing the number of interactions you need to manage by order of magnitude. You're also expected to be socially professional, "pleasant" as the article points. You're supposed to act graciously when your customers demand the impossible, or your manager doesn't understand the problem at hand. Leave your emotions, personality, and completely valid thoughts at the company main entrance: here you be a "pleasant professional".
Combined it with another trend: the onus for productivity increase is on the worker and not the employer, as it used to be in the factory floor (productivity increased with improved system, not individual effort). I think this point was from Byumg chul Han, and I can see that with the onus on productivity increase being on the worker, in a "be pleasant" job it will be more and more "sacrifice your true self to be maximum pleasant" and the result will be a horribly burnt out society.
So the authors prediction is rather dystopian. A workplace that focus on pleasantness with a detachment to meritocratic conditions will also inevitably converge to squashing of diverse thought and getting stuck in their heads.
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Works on chrome though
And here's the crazy part: I'm still not convinced this is the right take! Of course we are our jobs and what we do. It literally shapes who you get to meet on the dating market, favors you can call in, and so forth. How naive it is to think otherwise. The Cracked article that another post linked to is pretty spot-on.
Yes, obviously being a 'person' who can be 'with' people (cf. 'for' people) is simultaneously also a thing. Both are true. But "You are not your job" is just cope, and the tombstones and eulogies fall for it too.
> The harder version is asking yourself: if my job title disappeared tomorrow, would I still be me?
This part, though, misses an important point: status and wealth. And I think it’s especially directed at those.
It can be beautiful to identify yourself with your job if you are a professor or a social worker. The problem is identifying yourself with the social status provided by your job (paycheck and power), not the work itself.
Yeah it can. People have been using LLMs as therapists and digital friends for a while now. All of the soft skills were the first to get automated.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
Oh yeah? What exactly?
Imagine that tomorrow the government decided to pay $250K per year to each software engineer for life as long as they never worked again. Would there be a lot of anxiety about losing the meaning of existence? Of course not! SEs would be celebrating in the streets.
That means the anxiety about AI destroying jobs is all about economic loss, not psychological meaning.
Fully agreed.
>You're beginning to feel less-than-useful.
Nope, not at all. Or maybe I do feel a bit useless against the AI slop and FOMO that gets pushed around. But the field is still gonna need engineers to do the non-slop work, or to fix it when it goes wrong.
(I use AI daily BTW.)
As someone said: AI will take our jobs when the execs are able to state their requirements precisely. We're safe!
Robo Socialism is possible, I'd rather send a robot up to clean a roof , build a house, down a pipe , etc.
Robo taxis will be safer in due time.
Instead as the number of viable jobs continues to shrink we'll blame each other.
It makes it much easier for me to distinguish myself as a hard worker who cares about the business being successful. It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
When you are old and have lots of formative experiences that are not work-based, we can shake hands and mutually appreciate each other's motives and respective outcomes.
That said: I am NOT at all interested in identifying myself in social situations by my job. When someone asks what I do, I respond that I work in tech. I am not interested in giving more details nor talking in-depth about what I do to others I have just met.
Why? Because that's not at all what makes me...me. I am far more interested in what I do outside of work (reading...a lot, listening to music, spending as much time w/my family as possible, traveling, spending time at my lake home, etc). That is what I work to do; enjoy my life.
I realize this is an uncommon opinion, but I find it SO VERY ODD that folks are OBSESSED about their jobs and make it a central point of their existence to those outside of their specific industry. I do NOT care what someone does for their day-to-day; it's unlikely it will have any impact on me or my friendship with them. I want to know what they bring to the table in our current or potential social situation and the fact that they make PowerPoint presentations for whomever to look at, ask a few questions answered in the presentation's appendix, and never think about again doesn't do anything to further any of that.
If you believe the managers who interact with you have any say in who gets laid off, then your understanding of how business works isn't nearly as good as you seem to believe it is.
In most cases, this is a sucker mentality that makes you vulnerable to abusive employers. You will stress yourself out making your boss richer. They won't care or make reciprocal gestures. They'd be happy to replace you should you become inconvenient.
I can assure you that when they are laying off to cut costs, which is most of the time, what they notice is A) the old/expensive ones who can be let go without any major disruptions and B) the "expendables" such as contractors or those they have a personal dislike of - the latter usually has not much to do with hard work and a lot more to do with perception. Category A is to meet cost targets while category B can also help with number targets.
If you think your hard work alone will save you, I pray that life spares you that rude shock.
Sounds like you’re young and early in your career.
Wait till you’re part of a layoff where an entire division or arm of the company is axed in a 750 person headcount reduction.
Doesn’t matter how good you are, how many years of service you have or even if the CEO loves you. You’ll be out.
I got to this bit before realising this is satire
I don’t put any effort in now. Still get paid the same. Now have more time for better stuff.
Anyways, I get the point of the post, capitalism sucks and makes most of our existence as worth as cattle, that is, if we don't value the stuff outside work.
The tech industry used to be a refuge for analytical people who have severe social anxiety, but now it has been completely overrun by gold rush bros.
[1] AI Inevitability Soothsaying https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362178
> Saying "I am a software engineer" is beginning to feel like saying "I am a calcultor" in 1950 now that digital machines can use electrical circuits to count, add, multiply - it's not long until they'll be able differentiate a non-continuous function... You're beginning to feel less-than-useful.
> This bothers a lot of people for a reason (I think) that has nothing to do with the technology. The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are.
Get Fing real. Most, most, most people in the world need a job to survive. Some technologists might have stonks and financial independence. Those with stocks or other kinds of passive (parasitic) income are the minority.
I think that goes for most programmers as well.
Okay so we’re going to get to how this just means you’ll need to change jobs. So let’s wait for that.
> I like Susan Fiske's research on how humans judge each other shows something worth sitting with. When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?
This is farcical when you consider that people with enough capital can survive on just that, capital. No matter what the research says about “competence”. There are billions of dollars invested in portraying people with money as competent. But if that propaganda is ineffectual it’s not like it matters. The system is arranged such that they won’t be inconvenienced by the judgement of commoners.
> Thus far we have automated away "wasteful" or "unnecessary" jobs. Perhaps the elevator operator was your friend, someone you saw everyday. I'm not certain their purpose was "useless". They're gone nonetheless.
> This is the whole point of the system. [...]
The point of the system is to commoditize everything and concentrate wealth.
Labor is a commodity. Labor created automation. And labor will be discarded once the automation that it created displaces labor.
The automation is then fully in the hands of the so-called competent. Capital.
> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).
That’s rich. The author already told us the fairytale version of Capitalism, the version where we are supposedly all going to benefit. But now the author pretends to shy away and tell us that it is a blog post for another day?
No—you already took a stance with that statement, even with the premise of this therapeutic distraction since you assume that it is just a matter of changing jobs.
Is it though? When the whole system is made for Capital? And Capital obviously owns the automation? Who managed to buy up so much RAM that it caused a global shortage?
But meh, political structure and all that—trivialities for another day. We’re here to pump up Inevitability discourse with.
> You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.
I’ll remember that while in the unemployment line.