> There's something to be said for doing things because they are enjoyable. People cook for themselves because they enjoy the process, not just the meal. I climb mountains because it makes me feel good -- I wouldn't take a gondola to the top even if it existed. The 100m race is not run by motorcycles.
Respectfully, but I think you are not introspecting deeply enough here.
Why is cooking enjoyable? Some of it may be purely the tactile sensation of stirring spoons in goop. I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
You wouldn't take a gondola to the top of a mountain because you want to be a person who can climb mountains. How much of that desire comes from purely internal accomplishment versus wanting to be seen as a person who can do that hard thing? And what happens to that drive when no one around you cares?
Anthony Gatto was arguably the world's best numbers juggler for many years. Now he runs a concrete company, because it turns out most people just don't really give a shit about juggling. It's not enough for a task to be hard, it needs to be esteemed too.
> Perhaps we will value eachother on an even more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.*
How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything? How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships. But given that candy companies are some of the largest private companies in the world, I know that human nature means many people really will just check out and turn into vegetables.
Humans are like border collies. We need some amount of work and struggle to be psychologically healthy. If AI really does deliver us a post-scarcity life (unlikely, given the infinite greed of many of the elites), then I think a whole lot of people are going to lose their minds.
I climb the mountains because I am proud of myself, and I am proud of my own development. Not because I want someone to pat me on the back.
My outlook on life is that it is an experiment where you see how you can develop yourself throughout it. This growth is difficult and beautiful.
I am proud of myself, and the person I have become. I surround myself with people on the same mission.
This article describes a future like WALL-E. It sounds very lonely. I'll be sure to be in the pocket of people who are like minded, and set on their own pursuits.
I am actively choosing an existence where I don't get everything I want. It's the effort that makes it mean something to me, and it's the restrictions that make life worth living.
It might be useful to know that I programmed for >50% of my life, starting when I was 12. It was a huge part of my identity for most of my life. I was known to be extremely good at it. Think: newspaper articles, CEOs flying me out, etc.
Overcoming this entanglement of identity, ego, and competence was one of my proudest achievements in the past 5 years.
I am mostly at peace now, always trying to go further. I hope people like the author can find peace as well.
Maybe it's about the joy of learning something new every time you cook. Having Michelin star restaurants in your neighborhood would add to that joy, not take away from it.
> I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships.
The joy of learning something new is very much tied to said thing being meaningful or useful. You could spend the rest of your life memorizing digits of pi and you'd be spending all of it "learning something new" but you wouldn't enjoy it very much.
> I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
I think it's paradoxical to suggest Michelin-starred restaurants could be everywhere, given the whole point is the travel-worthiness i.e. a scarcity that justified effort.
That aside, to take the strongest form of the argument, I think even if every human being could get their ideal meal, no matter what it is, at any time and for free - and even if the cook in question is only doing it for social reasons - cooking would still be valued. It's the effort put in by a person which is scarce and precious. Even if people were immortal, that time in the present would still be valuable in itself.
> How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything?
Post-scarcity of material things won't sedate humans. Kindness is a thing wanted in and of itself, but more importantly, internal struggles and desires can't all be resolved through material gain.
> How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
The answer is apparently, pretty easily? By and large it seems the consensus is social media and digital content are exploiting a niche of providing a low-effort, highly-addictive pastime.
Today people have basically unlimited access to images of masterful works of art spanning hundreds of years. But they still hang up their kids inferior drawings at their cubicles instead.
Someone that gets it. Lots of odd out of touch takes in this thread. Folks here seem to think we're robots or something, I can't believe the wild things that are said in this thread. Strong believer that "humanity" always wins.
Some people have spent so much time min/maxing their lives that they forget most people don't treat every facet of their existence as something to optimize.
My cynical take is that architecture has been fully captured by the wealthy elite.
The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.
It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.
I REMEMBER THIS! Oh man, I haven't read this in forever. It was one of the blog posts that kicked off what became Iron Arachne, my own procgen project.
Thank you for writing it! I'm going to re-read this.
There is a decent amount of pop music in 6/8. I always joke that it's like a hack to making a song better because 6/8 is rare enough that it makes the song sound interesting but common enough to not alienate the listener. It ends up sounding mostly like a hard swung 4/4 but then fills and some melodic lines are just a little bit more rhythmically spicy.
> Pretty much all of those tracks are 20+ years old though.
I suspect that says more about me as a music listener than about the overall distribution of time signatures. I'm sure there's newer stuff using 6/8 too, but I don't listen to much pop music these days.
Due to the small nature of hot patching (eg. bump this dependency, rotate these keys, turn off that config, follow the runbook) it will unlikely need to be a frontier model and is likely able to be done LocalLLM/Jev style decision making rather than having to hand all the keys to frontier model operators.
The barbarians are at the gates and they're interested in laundering your compute and network for other attacks, scams, and things like transferring CSAM.
How much time do you need to audit? You might have an hour - for now.
Because it's highly relevant, I'm going to paraphrase a comment I made last week:
I think a big part of the problem is that middle-aged men are at the apex of their expectations to be successful in the eyes of society, and we are living through a period of time where success is very hard to define, much less attain.
There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1]. Émile Durkheim coined it in his book Suicide, written not too long after the Industrial Revolution.
In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.
In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.
I think for a lot of men, it feels like just at the time when we should be able to rest on our laurels a bit after having worked so hard to play the game society told us to, the rules have been ripped out from under us and any sense of security going forward is lost. We feel too old to learn the new rules of the game in time to play well, but not old enough to be able to abstain from playing.
Well said! 5 years ago I could have a pretty solid picture of what my career would look like through retirement.
Today, unclear what that would look like as well as unclear if the career will even exist that long.
One sunny spot I have is that life is very long. I think I have 1.5 careers left in me, and a full pivot is alright. I've been talking with older folks, and loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife.
> One sunny spot I have is that life is very long.
Not sure exactly where you are in it, but as a 53 year old I disagree. The younger I was the less likely I would have been to disagree but imo/ime the older you get the faster it feels like it is flying by.
> and a full pivot is alright
The AI-related existential dread is that it is very unclear what a pivot looks like when the ground under everything is shifting all at once.
The shifting is certainly a lot more obvious in our career than some others, but all of that shift (so far) happened more or less in a mere 10 months and is accelerating. And I don't think it is very likely that our career will stay anomalous for very long in terms of how much AI impact there is.
yeah, you're down to like 3/4 a career left, it makes sense that you feel that way. Less runway ought to feel different.
I do agree that a safe 'next' is unclear. But I also think if ai truly hits all knowledge work as hard as it might we're looking at up to 50% unemployment. Frankly there is no point career planning at all in that scenario. We will all have much larger problems.
And if it doesn't, then pivoting to some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.
>some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.
What makes you believe those jobs will still exist or will be available to you competing against massess of other now unemployed software devs? Overabundance of desperate workers will depress wages.
> if ai truly hits all knowledge work as hard as it might we're looking at up to 50% unemployment. Frankly there is no point career planning at all in that scenario. We will all have much larger problems.
If that much. I'm 52, and I wish I had decided 20 years ago that I'd rather do something meaningful. Like become a doctor. It would not necessarily be impossible to pivot to that now, but it would be very expensive and have a good chance of failure. If everything went smoothly, I could be a doctor just in time to retire.
> One sunny spot I have is that life is very long. I think I have 1.5 careers left in me, and a full pivot is alright.
I'm 41 and I could, in theory, pivot. But realistically: I'm good at exactly one thing in this world in terms of job ability. I can cook, I can bake, I can play music, but none nearly well enough to actually make a living on it. Thus the end of my tech career, if it should come to pass, basically means I will have to work menial jobs to get by. The future is very bleak for me, and the only real hope is that the tech industry will wake up to what a bad job LLMs do compared to humans. But while I think they will do that eventually, there's no telling how long it will take, and the thought that the market will eventually correct is cold comfort if I can't get a job in the meantime.
why dont you learn trading? maybe forex spot? dont you already have tech skills? why not make an agentic first project that acts like an institution that tracks trends and makes and optimized algorithms? use prop firms for low risk high reward investments, it will take time but SWEs are already primed for this kind of thing imo. took me 2 months to learn the basics and my project is progressing well now.
>loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife
Lots of people didn't have their field automated away though alongside most other knowledge work fields, or seen at the same time a drop in demand in manual work and an oversupply (drop in demand because of upcoming AI layoffs, and oversupply in manual fields, because of same)
Also I imagine a lot of demand for plumbers might drop because AI might help you to learn to solve easy cases. Imagine you turn on you camera and it would just tell you what to do exactly.
I have just called a plumber to do a leaking radiator replacement. Not because I don't have the tools or I don't have YouTube, but because I didn't want to do it.
But get a little more squeezed and with less salary due to AI eliminating your job or your field's salary bargaining power, and you'll try to not call one if you can avoid it, even if you don't want to do it yourself.
Currently AI made me way more work and unpaid over hours already buy sorting out the 10x expectations and the slop grenades by the 10x workers, that is why i needed it... so I can't even have this much feeling of having accomplished anything myself.
I'm not sure how this will work out. Burnout will be standard, and almost universal soon, apart from the previous low-performer, low skilled bottom of barrel folks who will mass produce crap with this.
Yes, buuut: I think we are already really close to that for a long time. You could learn a lot just from internet and youtube. But most people, I feel, just do not like to neither do plumbing/diy nor learn about it. Like if I tell people they can save hundreds of € by changing their own brake pads and that it is really easy to diy, they just shrug and go to the mechanic.
So I am not sure if AI will really increase the percentage of people willing to learn these skills and do repairs etc
Yeah the information has been available for awhile. What stops people is all the indoctrination and conditioning.
"I'm not allowed to replace my water heater, the government says I need permits, the government says only a plumber can connect a gas line"
I don't think people realize that the people doing entry level skilled work like replacing your water heater or swapping your brakes at jiffy lube often only exceed the caliber of labor that's in a McDonalds when it comes to attendance and pissing clean.
Some stuff you really shouldn’t do just because you saw some youtube videos, and it has fuck-all to do with “government indoctrination.”
I grew up in trades. I’ve seen shit work and dangerous work and serviceable work and beautiful work. And sometimes even I didn’t actually know the difference until an inspector (and family member) explained it.
So I do small stuff. If it’s serious and I can afford it, I use a trusted professional.
> So I do small stuff. If it’s serious and I can afford it, I use a trusted professional.
I'm with you here. Though I have to say, on the flip side, oftentimes when I choose to DIY something it is because I don't necessarily trust that I can find a professional who won't cut corners in ways not obvious to me. I've seen it happen too many times. I may be a lot slower, but I'm extremely thorough at the stuff that I do myself.
Plumbers are paid well because of the way they organized.
-They restricted the number of apprentices. That limited the number of people in the field similar to medical school.
-They could bar substandard workers from practising in the city of London.
-They kept their craft knowledge in house and it was never written down. Apprentices swore oaths never to reveal the “secret of the mystery.”
If you look at programming we do everything the opposite. It’s no wonder salaries will collapse. In fact the only question is why didn’t they collapse sooner.
Definitely. IMO, plumbing is one of those trades that videos on YouTube seem to help a lot more than an LLM. Code and simple stuff an LLM is great, but anything more complex or getting into heavy installation not so much.
pivot to what though, if "mind" jobs are going to be automated, it's not like there's a category of jobs that opens up, and going from mental to physical jobs in your 50s doesn't seem that easy
Physical jobs will drop in demand and increase in supply too. Unemployed "mind" workers don't have much to spend to drive much demand in manual work, and they might even try to pivot themselves to manual work, making things worse for manual workers.
and those who did the "mind jobs" 30-40 years ago retain that wealth, while wages plummet and they don't have to give up any significant part of their wealth to get what they want. This destroys class mobility , creating a type of feudalism.
Because we have a largely paper pushing service economy and so the guy who's plumbing a luxury condo is dependent upon the existence of some overpaid javascript monkey who the builder/financiers are counting on to buy the condo when it's done.
If you automate the paper pushing what happens? Jeff Bezos isn't gonna buy more condos.
It seems unlikely "physical AI" will be a complete bust but the post you're replying to is positing that fewer people will have money to spend on their services.
A lot of well-paid physical labor is going to face more competition from DiY + AI guidance among able-bodied and cost sensitive adults.
Even 1.5 years ago I replaced a blower motor in my vehicle with something like Sonnet 3.8 as the driver - saving myself $400 in labor and having a fun and educational experience to boot. Many home repair items fall into categories like this, where the actual physical skill demands are fairly low, but skills + background knowledge + supplies-on-hand were the value driver.
The BG knowledge is now available to anyone for free, and it comes with its own knowledgeable shopper.
Yeah, fewer "office jobs" and more automated jobs in general, means less demand for manual jobs from those (as money will be tighter).
But also, many existing office jobs type will try (or be forced) to get into manual jobs, and many young people will see AI-dominated fields as a dead end and also try to get into a manual job career, increasing supply, and further driving manual job wages down.
Exactly. There is no safe career. None. If AI replaces even a modest chunk of the knowledge workers, salaries across the entire workforce are going to tank. Some very specialized areas that require a lot of training may be insulated for a time, but even they will inevitably feel the impact.
I'm glad I'm not inclined to be a doomer, because the future would seem pretty bleak.
It's a spectrum, with "physical" and "mental" at each end.
Some of Software folk i know move to repairing electronic devices for living. He still works in AC-room, but instead of holding mouse and keyboard most of the time, now he holds meter probe and soldering iron.
I disagree with a lot of these social analysis texts because I think they misunderstand a fundamental premise. There is no pressure from society today, on the contrary. You had that when we were living in villages where everyone knew each other and it is what city dwellers escaped from.
But this never had been reevaluated. Modern societies are detached, nobody really cares what you do, you don't know your neighbours, you have no "third place" or common place any more.
So norms and rules are far less pronounced than in any other time in human history, far less so.
If you go out without pants in a big city, very few people would care. In better situated parts, you can expect that the police will probably pick you up. In less fortunate environments, you would just be pantless.
This is the opposite of expectations and pressures. I think many just aren't really part of a society or environment any more.
For some that is a great loss while others strive in this state as well. For many having some kind of responsibility is a very important part of their lives, but modern societies offer little here. We optimise for as little attachment as possible to stay flexible and dynamic. That of course can be a pressure as well, but not in the sense it is often suggested.
But summarised I think the problem is fundamentally misunderstood: Society doesn't put pressure on anyone, society simply stopped caring about you. I think this is what most societal analysts get completely wrong.
on the one hand, we're detached; on the other hand, social media in particular -- and the media in general -- has increased the amount of pressure and painted a picture of "who you should be". The expectations are greater than ever because we are subjected to the knowledge of the expectations of everyone across the globe, and most of what we see are the "highlight reels" of the successes (or people trying to sell us something to be successful).
Contrary to your premise, society today applies tremendous pressure because our awareness and the continuous bombardment of information, amplifies it. And unless you decide to go and live off grid, or you have a personality such as you can say FU to the world on a daily basis, it's impossible to escape.
Certainly the level of detachment and alienation has been growing for a long time and is now at quite an extreme. I’m not sure that I would characterize that by saying there is less societal pressure overall though. People feel pressure for lots of reasons and it doesn’t necessarily require the judgment of another individual observing them.
>There is no pressure from society today, on the contrary.
What!?
The examples you give implies people are ok with being bums on the street (and if you think that life is "easy", boy, you're massively detached from reality).
Have you heard that a record number of people still live with their parents after 30?
Have your heard that a record number of people do not own their home these days? It has never been worse.
Have you heard that entire professions are being rendered obsolete due to AI and other economic factors?
Are you aware that almost nobody who is middle-aged (the demographic of TFA) will retire with enough money to make a living off it?
Explain to me how is that a chill, no-pressure life? I do not see it.
You might try to "akshually" your way into "but I'm talking about social pressure", but all of those things are social in nature.
>So norms and rules are far less pronounced than in any other time in human history, far less so.
Ever heard of "misgendering"?
A guy re-posted a meme (not of his authorship) and went to jail, lost his job, etc[1].
Two parents were arrested in front of their kid for complaining about their school, another guy spoke bad about his past employer (but not threatening behavior) and got arrested and his property seized, etc... [2]
Yeah sure man, quite relaxed times, like never before.
I think you need to separate these issues. Economic pressure is a separate concern that doesn't stem from a more arbitrary source. A society can and should shield you from it, but doing so will always create societal expectations on someone else.
If you cannot provide for yourself, someone else has to do so. That someone else technically might be subjected to societal expectations to not leave you behind because he has the means to do so. Mothers still have large expectation on them on how they have to treat their children. If those run around freely, you will get a lot pressure in the US. Quite a silly country. But I believe this is an exception to the general development.
I separate purely economic pressure from the moral and ethical requirements you have today and these are clearly declining in my opinion. These were always subjected to change, but usually expectations get exchanged for new ones and old ones are done away with.
Weird gender science, middle eastern war or domestic politics experts are loud and they do indeed put forward expectations. But their ambitions aren't generally awarded by society, on the contrary. Sometimes for very good reason, sometimes not. But generally there are far less expectations for behaviour, expression, opinions. Also sometimes for good reason and sometimes not.
I think most societies lost expectations and care less about their environment (no in the ecological sense, but that too...).
> The examples you give implies people are ok with being bums on the street (and if you think that life is "easy", boy, you're massively detached from reality).
He means for normal people, sure if you go around assaulting people like you could in the unenlightened times you get more pressure. What you both mean by "pressure" is oversocialization you are just looking at 2 sides of the same coin. Well his point is more about people feeling uncared for, I doubt that drives people to suicide. One explaination is that is could this mental l strain could increase the liklihood for mental illness, but that's flat for men in the articles age bracket. You posit that people kill themselves because they have a tough life, again that isn't born out in the data. Indeed collecting data for this is akin to hitting a dartboard while drunk and skydiving and the board is 2 miles away.
The point of society you can increase "true freedom" by restricting people's ability to act arbitrarily, so called "naive freedom". If people can't accept that then they can go live in the woods (not anymore), the ocean, the moon? mars? or end it.
From time immemorial the winners shaped society what do you think happened to the losers? Just because we leave them alive now doesn't mean they can live in the new world.
Also "highest ever" among some specific arbitrary demographic isn't very meaningful enough to draw out anything beyond free association.
> "highest ever" among some specific arbitrary demographic isn't very meaningful
It's meaningful if you do actually happen to be of that demographic. It's no longer arbitrary then, sure, but I do care quite a lot if something bad is affecting men because I'm one of those.
Not only that, but many of the people I care most about in the world are men too ! probably a bit over half!
Also, how specific is "middle aged men"? thats a huge portion of society - I'd have understood your point if this was about like, people employed as painters in texas. But this has such a huge N, alongside a relatively unambiguous test (I trust reporting of these statistics more or less)
there is a lot of pressure from women because of their hypergamous nature. As they make more and more money get better careers, thair mating pool of mdn they want and who also want them shrinks substantially
Is that not the epitome of the classic mid life crisis?
You hit a point in your life, reflect back on where you'd thought you'd be when you were in your early 20s, and think.. shit.. what I do all of this for?
This isn't even a flippant comment (especially given the subject matter); being at this age and thinking "I imagined it would all be easy by now" does hit home.
> You hit a point in your life, reflect back on where you'd thought you'd be when you were in your early 20s, and think.. shit.. what I do all of this for?
Do people who say this have kids? I ask genuinely. Everything before my little dude was fake. Everything since him is real deal Holyfield. Probably knock off in the next 20 minutes and take him to Home Depot to look at some bullshit because we have a good time with that kind of thing.
Yes, men who have children do go through nihilistic existential mid life crises too. That age has their biggest risk of cheating on their partners, fathering new children with work colleagues, walking away from marriage, developing drug and alcohol dependency, developing serious gambling problems and other worse things. Parenthood reduces but does not eliminate the risk of suicide in middle aged men, and parenthood plus long term joblessness is a common cause.
Midlife anxieties are real and nothing in particular prevents it.
I can imagine having kids is super rewarding, but also amplifies the pressure of being a provider probably 100x. In uncertain times, I think a lot of us aren't sure how we'll provide for ourselves in ~5 years, let alone a tiny dude, which plays into the decision to not have kids.
I'm still gainfully employed, and business is ripping, but a huge part of my value as a professional got totally vaporized over the last year. So part of me is extremely glad I don't have kids right now, and part of me is really angry that everything feeling so unstable is leading to our decision to not have them. I know that even in the best time it's a scary decision, but the general vibe is flipping people (like my wife and i) who are at the margin.
I am in this awkward situation where I just had a baby, but at the same time feel I should work less and put less effort into work. But at the same time not being able to slow down.
I daydream about being fired with severance so I can spend more time with my little dude. But also deadly afraid of not being able to get another job when savings run out.
Congrats on baby and best of luck balancing this. In my limited experience it's the balancing that is the actual work that allows all the other domestic and professional work for this part of my life.
> a huge part of my value as a professional got totally vaporized over the last year
We are all descendants of like 1,000 individuals who kept having lil babies through an ice age. There are mobile home parks full of happy kids dotting my town, populated by people who paint houses and do landscaping and make ends meet. I have no idea what your profession is or what your housing situation is, so maybe that's already where you are. My wife and I talk gratitude a lot, and that includes being grateful that if we had to dig ditches to keep a double wide over our heads, we'd go ahead and do that and have some giggles with our little miracle in there.
Nah you're way off the mark here and this sounds scarily like how people feel when at their most bleak. I hope this is just you reflecting and not how you feel "in real life" - family needs family and kids need their parents. Kids need their parents even if they're broke and/or out of work.
I don't dismiss or discount your perspective but based on my social circle: Your experience of fatherhood is not the median. The variance is pretty high too.
I agree. I'm a father of two, and my existence didn't suddenly get meaningful when I had children. I always found it meaningful, only in the sense that I get one life and want to experience as much as I can while I have it. That is a big part of why I chose to have children, it seemed like basically *the* fundamental life experience. But for me, I didn't experience this sudden big gain in meaning that a lot of online fathers seem to have.
I also wasn't prepared for a bit of a curve ball and I have experienced a loss of self that hasn't recovered or been compensated for yet.
I often wish I felt like a lot of other online fathers, but I take comfort in knowing there are a lot of others out there like me who struggle with parenthood. I hope I figure it all out in time!
Only one kid and I can't pretend it is all sunshine and rainbows, but there are real moments that make some of the other things irrelevant. It is possible that I went into fatherhood older and with eyes wide open so it was less of an adjustment, but it still surprised me in how things slowly re-aligned. Meaning was basically a side-effect of near exclusive focus on someone else ( for me ).
And that was my long way to say, the struggle is real and we are all figuring it out in real time. gl out there
I’m grateful for your comment. I’m also a father of two, and the “loss of self” has frankly worsened over time (though my oldest isn’t even 4 yet).
After the second, I thought it would get better, and that a Contented Doting Father would emerge from the ruins of my previous life. That the attention and effort required would simply obliterate any trace of my past self, and with it, any longing for the spontaneity and lightness and frankly selfishness of my child-free life.
But that hasn’t happened. There are moments of grace and joy, and I love my kids so deeply it’s painful (he says, truthfully, but defensively, because an admission like this from a father usually doesn’t go over well).
But counterintuitively, returning to the topic of the thread, if I DO lose my career, I will be doubly grateful for my kids. Because they DO love me unconditionally, and I them; they don’t care about status games or anomie or anything resembling a “career.” Perhaps starting over in a new field and moving to a cheaper COL area would finally clear space for the Contented Doting Father.
Unsolicited pov. Don't do this to yourself. I don't doubt that there exists such a person, but it's not the norm and when it is observed I reckon it is as often someone feigning as it is anything else.
Love your kids and raise them as best you know how. That's the deal. That's enough. You are allowed space to miss aspects of your life before, and that may or may not fade.
I am also so grateful to hear this in response to my comment.
As far as I see it, I use the term "online fathers" in a rather cynical manner. In real life, I interact with parents who are struggling, I know some who are suffering from depression (I'm lucky to belong to a sports club where some dads unload). This is real life.
But go online and you'd think you're some sort of freak for not being completely transformed and having unconditional daily joy from being a dad.
By the way. The last week has been a good week. I've had a lot of work stress, but my children seem to have somehow sensed it and they're being extra kind to me, giving me lots of hugs and just wanting to be with me. It feels WONDERFUL. Like you, I love them more than I would have ever known, would literally die for them. But it is also ok to admit it is very hard, and there is a big loss of self and other aspects.
Kids loose interest in you as they age and do their own stuff. You are necessary for their survival, but they prefer company of peers. And then they leave.
All of that is normal, but you are left alone and if taking the kid somewhere was your only thing, you have nothing.
that's what I felt about moving to a different country, too, until I didn't.
I think these things are less consistent than is often stated, we just see them occur consistently among people with similar lives. The "mid life crisis" is also debunked and replaced by "existential crisis" since it can actually occur at any age, from teenager to elderly, and zero, one, or multiple times. Only in the classic life progression of a certain era, it typically occurred worst at around 40-45 so it got that label.
I would think those with kids at that age that wanted them worked backwards from that mission, and if they have a midlife crisis it's some version of having spent too much time working and on their kid and start spending their money on low-impact possibly expensive hobbies they'd have liked to do in their younger years, somewhat in denial of the fact that they sold their whole life to the man despite raising a kid.
But that sounds nice! Let me reword: after getting through the messy middle of establishing a career and weathering the insane time and money necessary to rear a young kid, a dude finds himself with a little more time and money, and doesn't know what to do with himself. He gets a fishing rod/road bike/membership at makerspace/skein of nice yarn and some circular needles/signs up for his first powerlifting meet. He makes new friends, shows his kid a new side of himself, and maybe gets a nice steelhead/race trinket/dining table/scarf/medal out of the whole thing.
Sure, seems like it would be a standard path in another time. The real personal crisis in that position these days is probably being forced to find a new career instead of or alongside raising a kid. Unless you get quite lucky, things can get dark very quickly. Job loss creates stress, prolonged unemployment might break up your relationship, lose access to the kid maybe, and suddenly you're destitute. It's hard to see prospects for normal people getting better, and it makes more sense to avoid the kid and the house.
I had two kiddos by the time I as 23 and I'm in my late 40s now. I am super glad that they are off on their own, living their own successful lives and I am very proud of them.
You too will (hopefully) watch your children move away.
Personally, when I am down I've been feeling a little like I've finished the main quest in a video game. I can look to my kiddos and be happy that they are doing okay but I still have almost as much adult life in front of me as I have behind me.
While the philosophy degree I got when I was young has helped a lot, I'm middle age, twice-divorced, and haven't had (or needed) a "regular" job, bald (well, I rock a skullet and have 'aura' according to the youngesters), and I can't rock climb as hard as I used to. I don't really enjoy drinking anymore, and I don't enjoy many drugs at all. I've gotten to a position where it's hard to maintain the fantasies that make romantic partners appealing, and while I have deep and diverse friend groups, I still spend most of my time in a shack in the middle of nowhere writing music for no one.
When people shit-talk on humanities educations, it's been hard to keep my mouth shut because the real payoffs have been in being able to meet the long and large world with some equanimity and I feel incredibly privileged to have been so misguided in my early life that I got a deep and canonical education.
There are plenty of things that I can do- keeping with the video game metaphor, I feel like I am working through all possible side quests on hard mode. Being emancipated from my children means that I no longer have to earn very much money or even maintain a stable home if I don't enjoy it.
I bought some off grid land in the middle of nowhere and I am slowly getting utilities working in the shacks. I started doing way more direct political action, including getting an EMT cert so I could volunteer at the local free clinic. I have 4 bands and play 5-6 gigs a month and run an A/V company where I do another 2-3 gigs a month.
So, yeah, I've got a pretty good skill set, I have however easy a life that I choose, lots of engagement in my enclosure. I have kids I am proud of.
And even looking at all that, I look at even a couple of years and sometimes wonder "shit.. what I do all of this for?". And I know that in another 25 years I will still probably asking that question, wondering if there had been a better way to do the things.
Enjoy browsing stuff with your kiddos. That is indeed the important kind of activity. But also, understand that you too will (hopefully) face existential choices in the future.
Yeah I think having him later in my life and him still being a toddler just means "having kids" means wildly different things in our cases. In my case, the life altering pivots (getting sober, married, divorced) happened before meeting my wife with whom I had him. I guess I got extremely lucky having the nuclear life changer of a baby show up at the age where such a thing is welcome. We just started touring preschools and the rapid approach of a time where I'm not within 30 feet of him for 90% of the day is already a pretty daunting prospect.
Yes. Come on, I love my kid, but you can't seriously be asking this question. Fatherhood is in fact sometimes part of what they're so dissatisfied with.
> The only thing keeping me alive is the idea of revenge against the people who insult us like this.
Pretty major red flag there. As an awkward, small, unattractive teen I could've related. Yet the best thing was letting it go and finding other people whom I could connect with.
FWIW, social status comes from “interestingness” rather than the pure application of time and money. Anything that is mostly grinding (a few million, muscles, etc) doesn’t clear that threshold. At best it checks a box.
If there isn’t a compelling story behind it, it probably doesn’t convey social status. Poor people with interesting lives often have far more success in the dating market than “successful” people that are indistinguishable from every other successful person. It is less about collecting credentials and more about writing a story that people want to read.
Fortunately, the bar for this is low. Most people have done few interesting things in their entire lives despite abundant opportunity. Many people that have lived interesting lives fail to tell the story. Having time and money expands the kind of story you can write but you still need the courage to live it.
I wish I would have figured this out earlier in my life than I did.
I've travelled around the world, lived in 4 countries, read hundreds of books, I played guitar. Only thing I don't have is smoking and tattoos.
I'm just slightly autistic, which is barely visible, but makes me socially untalented, I make small mistakes or don't notice clues, and here I am, 43, hating everyone. A small communication handicap at the beginning, that society took as an excuse to fail my life entirely. I'm happy to have lived so far, I couldn't guess at an earlier age how lengths people go hurting their fellow citizen.
I don't doubt that social media and dating apps may have broken the "market", but if you're living for revenge then women can probably pick up on that.
Guys that do have families are willing to give up a lot too. Things I was never really willing to give up.
I have dated a lot and there is one woman I would have wanted kids with. She wasn't into that with me though.
That is not a problem with the woman, that is a problem with me.
I know a few guys in this same situation. It is not a problem with the dating market, it is a type of narcissism that clouds judgement and sets standards that can't be met.
It is hard to see it in yourself until you get a vasectomy.
I guess it's hard to understand what women want...
CEO could mean no free time to spend with her. Muscular for what? Are you climbing or doing some other interesting sport or just spend time at the gym?
A lot of money, but are you doing something good with it? Helping people? At least some women think that's admirable.
I don't know you personally, so it's just some general vibe I've gotten from your post. No offense, maybe none of this is you but if it is it might be worth thinking about.
Most people who are saying this to you are in a similar situation like yourself, but with that missing element you have.
If you have money, but they don't, then they think there must be your fault, because if they had money, they wouldn't be in this situation.
If you're muscular, but they're not, then they think if they were muscular, they wouldn't be in this situation.
The biggest insult in the incel community is not someone who gets laid, but that someone is a volcel larping as an incel (purely as an attempt to demoralize them)
I do agree that the dating market is broken, but only men can find a way out of this. And those women want to be saved too, just not the way you think.
I'm sorry, but it's pretty hard to believe that you have all these qualities and are still alone because of women or whatever. I've met so many horrible men that are married and have a family, and they are not millionaires, muscular or providers.
The world is large. I will say what I used to say when people complained about how awful dating was pre social media, if you are shopping at a bar, it is like shopping in the gutter, you may find a gem but more often it is shit.
There are alot of women who want kids but they likely are not in the pool you engage with. Go to a conservative US christian state, join a church, engage with the community, it is easy. I bet the issue is that you do in fact have a standard and that standard is the barrier.
If it helps, almost every wealthy man i have known engaged with escorts or prostitutes at some point so I wouldnt view it as shameful and who knows, you may learn something about yourself in the process.
> Go to a conservative US christian state, join a church
While this strategy can work, it also means your kids will likely be taught hell is a real place most of humanity will go to suffer in eternal flames. (Possibly from a very young age.) Does not help with mental health.
Red states also have quite a lot of racism, IME. So be sure to be at least passing as white and with little or no accent.
> I bet the issue is that you do in fact have a standard and that standard is the barrier.
Among the guys I've known this seems to be the biggest factor. Of course ladies have their own expectations. Everyone seems to relax them as they get older.
> So actually I think the real solution to these problems is actually banning birth control.
Anytime where someone thinks the solution to a problem is taking away choices from another group it's time to be very very suspicious to say the least.
There's a lot of points in this post that are common talking points in the "manosphere":
> you get a lot of single men who want to kill themselves and a lot of single women who are fine with being single
> What’s happening is a population crisis. Women don’t get with men, men are frustrated but also there’s no children.
These are not widely accepted viewpoints.
It's impossible to prove or disprove something like these are "wrong" or "right", but blaming women for male unhappiness is a prime tactic that is very similar to the common tactic of blaming an outgroup. It's not a good thing!
>Anytime where someone thinks the solution to a problem is taking away choices from another group it's time to be very very suspicious to say the least.
Is it? Nature and evolution never gave us the choice for millions of years. We only had the choice for the last century and for the first time in human history, humanity is hitting population decline. Asia, notably Korea, Japan, and china are hitting it first.
>These are not widely accepted viewpoints.
Who cares about widely accepted? How about let's talk truth. Is it real or not real? HN has been widely wrong about AI and self driving cars, The US population voted for trump and has been largely wrong. Widely accepted is not widely true.
>It's impossible to prove or disprove something like these are "wrong" or "right", but blaming women for male unhappiness is a prime tactic that is very similar to the common tactic of blaming an outgroup. It's not a good thing!
WE don't need to prove anything. It's just a discussion. When people on HN ask for scientific proof and statistical validation it halts the conversation and is unfair because MOST things cannot ever be validated like this. There's no point. I won't hold you to that because if I did the discussion will end. Present your argument and I'll give it a fair read, I won't do something stupid and ask for a scientific paper.
Also Why don't you take more time to read what I wrote. I never BLAMED women. My argument is women are changing and that is the cause of a lot of problems. Take a closer look, I said women becoming more empowered and the rise of feminism ARE good things... it's morally right. But their are intrinsic biological consequences because things have not been this way biologically for millions of years.
Think of it like how the female praying mantis eating the male praying mantis after they mate. That is NOT a morally right action. I mean it's technically murder... But it happens because of biology. The intrinsic dilemma here is nature vs. ethics. By creating a more ethical society we have exited gender norms established by nature for millions of years. We give people choice which is ethical, but orgasms and sex were CLEARLY biologically evolved to be addictive and remove choice from the equation.
So what is the correct action here? Be ethical or align our behavior with biological norms which are clearly unethical? I don't actually know. But there are clearly logistical consequences that occur when people don't behave the way they were evolved to behave. How much "ethics" are we willing to give up to prevent those consequences? Again I don't actually know.
Look up the population decline, it's a real thing. You can buy a house (a really good one) for 10k in Japan due to massive population loss. It's a real problem that will affect all of us WITHIN out lifetimes. Birth control is definitely a causal factor within it.
And also get over the idea that our biology is aligned with ethics. It's not this way for praying mantises and don't expect it to magically be that way for humans.
>> Anytime where someone thinks the solution to a problem is taking away choices from another group it's time to be very very suspicious to say the least.
> Is it?
Yes.
To quote you: "get over the idea that our biology is aligned with ethics."
> Nature and evolution never gave us the choice for millions of years. We only had the choice for the last century and for the first time in human history, humanity is hitting population decline. Asia, notably Korea, Japan, and china are hitting it first.
You say this like population decline is a bad thing.
It's true that it upends economic growth that is based on population growth.
Beyond that it's not particularly clear cut.
> Also Why don't you take more time to read what I wrote. I never BLAMED women.
And yet your solution is to make them have more children ("So actually I think the real solution to these problems is actually banning birth control.), and "Women don’t get with men, men are frustrated but also there’s no children"
You causal chain clearly makes women responsible: you argue that population growth is the solution to male suicide(!!), that women "don't get with men", and therefore the solution to the male suicide problem is to ban birth control.
To make it crystal clear:
There is no evidence that shrinking population leads to male suicide.
There are good arguments that a shrinking population is a good thing.
This pulls out the two pillars that support your argument for banning birth control.
>get over the idea that our biology is aligned with ethics.
This quote is true. See praying mantis example. Plenty of examples where the male or female dies sacrificing itself for the next generation. These are not ethical features of biology. They are practical and they factually exist.
>You say this like population decline is a bad thing.
It is. The eventual end of population decline is the decline of civilization and eventually the end of humanity. The first part we face in our lifetimes is economic decline, joblessness, and more.
>Beyond that it's not particularly clear cut.
It's clear cut, within your lifetime you will see a 1st world country be brought down by a complete lack of people. Japan or Korea. We already see the effects in the country. Entire towns and villages vanishing. You just need to scale that up to see what happens next. This is not theoretical. It is happening in front of our eyes.
>And yet your solution is to make them have more children
That's not blame. When a woman has children, so does a man. The man bares the same responsibility.
>You causal chain clearly makes women responsible
It does. They aren't responsible willingly. It's not that they made a bad choice and they become responsible. It's a logistical fact. For example if your car breaks down and you can't drive it. The thing responsible for breaking down is the car. But is it the cars fault? No. Women are the causal source, but it's not their fault.
If you want to make things more fair. Porn is a causal factor from the male side. It keeps a lot of males perpetually single.
>There is no evidence that shrinking population leads to male suicide.
I never claimed this. My claim is that men BEING single and not able to find a male or a girlfriend or a wife increases suicide rates. Think about it. It's a very VERY realistic proposition.
>There are good arguments that a shrinking population is a good thing.
There is FACTUAL on the GROUND realities that show currently how bad it is.
>This pulls out the two pillars that support your argument for banning birth control.
>> You say this like population decline is a bad thing.
> It is. The eventual end of population decline is the decline of civilization and eventually the end of humanity. The first part we face in our lifetimes is economic decline, joblessness, and more.
That's a ridiculous claim unsupported by any evidence.
The counter argument has much stronger backing: If we measure "civilization" by standard of living and technological progress then they are associated with lower birth rates.
>>You causal chain clearly makes women responsible
> It does. They aren't responsible willingly.
Like I said - blaming women.
> My claim is that men BEING single and not able to find a male or a girlfriend or a wife increases suicide rates. Think about it. It's a very VERY realistic proposition.
The evidence doesn't show this. eg:
> Suicide fatality rate was higher in married people compared to the unmarried, however, after adjusting for age as a determinant factor, no significant difference was observed between the 2 groups.
There is some evidence that divorce increases suicide amongst men:
> Divorce did matter in a negative way, but only for men. What seems important about divorce is not that the men end up unmarried. Remember that the men who had always been single were no more likely to kill themselves than the men who were currently married. Instead, having once been married and then getting divorced seems to be the risk – again, only for the men.
> That's a ridiculous claim unsupported by any evidence.
It’s called following the trendline. We have current rates of population decline and past rates of population decline and we do a projection and we get one of the few quantitative predictors in our statistical arsenal. All else is qualitative speculation.
> Like I said - blaming women
Are you reading what I wrote? Take a look at what I wrote again before starting shit.
> The evidence doesn't show this.
Among the suicides by men age 45 to 64 those are the divorced men. That is the age where divorces happen.
Marriage shouldn’t be banned. Condoms should.
And outside of this. Your rude ass comments and witch hunt like accusations were uncalled for.
This isn’t historically true. Women used to work outside the home, it’s a relatively recent phenomenon that the nuclear family with a stay at home mother was the norm. So the basis of your argument is false
Stop insulting me. If you have a counter argument to present, present it. Calling something you disagree with nonsense and presenting no argument or making up shit just shows you don't know what you're talking about.
There simply is no reason to engage with the points you’re trying to make because they are all founded on a bed of lies and deception. If you feel insulted because people call you on your bullshit then tough shit I guess
Then don’t engage. The fact that you decided to engage to write this is a display of how malicious you are. You engage to hurt people. You don’t engage to learn or to see other view points.
Frankly when the topic is suicide people who lack empathy like you really should just exit the room entirely. You exacerbate the problem. I can guarantee you people who kill themselves have been verbally assaulted by people like you.
Also how do you know what I said is founded on a bed of lies and deception? You’re thinking I’m akin to a flat earther but have you ever looked at yourself? Mainstream religion is largely bullshit fantasy with people walking on water and rising from the dead. Have you considered that our own beliefs are although mainstream largely also bullshit?
I doubt you have given the raw malice and anger that exudes from your response. Calm the fuck down and consider the arguments.
Maybe it will sound harsh, sorry for that, but I'm going to be real: people like you should be alone, and will be alone, no matter what happens with women rights in the future. If they are not choosing you now, they will not choose you because they got pregnant or something else. You will still be alone.
You talk about status, but you are here, on HN, where a lot of wealthy people are. You probably have more money than 99% of men. And you still can't get pussy. Look at the @eastbound guy, multimillionaire, muscular, and still not getting pussy. You need something external to validate your shortcomings, and that's human.
Go outside and look at every straight couple that you see. Do you really believe that every one of them are higher status than you, and that's why you are alone? Do you really believe that every woman out there expects to be married to a multimillionaire handsome man? It's delusional, sorry
>Maybe it will sound harsh, sorry for that, but I'm going to be real: people like you should be alone, and will be alone, no matter what happens with women rights in the future. If they are not choosing you now, they will not choose you because they got pregnant or something else. You will still be alone.
I applaud your realness. And I sincerely hope it is completely real with no emotional bias. Tell me the truth like it is. Normally stuff like this gets flagged by dang in HN, but I disagree. If you feel it's true, it should be said.
That being said, there is an argument for making things impersonal. Talk about the state of the world, why needle in on the person making the argument and talk about his personal circumstance? It makes me think even though you CLAIM to be real, I think you're just emotional and trying to get an emotional response. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though.
>You talk about status, but you are here, on HN, where a lot of wealthy people are. You probably have more money than 99% of men. And you still can't get pussy. Look at the @eastbound guy, multimillionaire, muscular, and still not getting pussy. You need something external to validate your shortcomings, and that's human.
I don't get as much pussy as I like, nor do I get the girls that I really want. This is true. But I do get around. So this is not fully true.
>Go outside and look at every straight couple that you see. Do you really believe that every one of them are higher status than you, and that's why you are alone?
NO. Dude you're projecting. I'm talking about the population crisis. I'm talking about suicide rates. All my arguments refer to that, it doesn't even touch other couples or "status" or multimillionars. You're completely wrong on where this argument is coming from.
>Is that not the epitome of the classic mid life crisis?
The classic epitome of the mid life crisis has always been something along the lines of, "I spent my whole life working and doing a job that I didn't like, sacrificing my youth and my precious time with my friends and family, and all I'm left with is money. My mortality is coming into view, my best years are behind me, and as I sit here in my big house with my fancy car, I realize I wasted all that time all chasing dollars."
That's a lot different than, "I spent my whole life working and doing a job that I didn't like, sacrificing my youth and my precious time with my friends and family, and I'm left with nothing at all. I have no prospect for retirement, will likely become homeless and destitute when I am unable to continue working and/or am laid off, and their is no future."
"I spent my whole life working and doing a job that I really loved, sacrificing my youth and my precious time with my friends and family, and I'm still left with nothing at all"
I still got burned out.
Loving the career didn't change much.
Now the machines do what I loved to do. I had nothing, but at least I had pride and there was social recognition.
All vanities. Life lesson there.
I don't know what I was chasing, some sort of poetic output. I looked a famous people in this career, I just wanted to leave my name there.
But now I don't, I hate AI and I think its a bad path for humanity.
I guess I can still leave my name elsewhere, maybe I start the Butlerian Jihad somehow.
I imagine myself being the one bureaucrat in the Jihad that banned the use of CPUs with more power than a 80486.
That makes me happy and create a motive to still live.
I think this is a perfect description. The feelings continue across generations with no answer. Meanwhile society continues to shift underneath mens' feet. And still tries to claim it is a personal problem. The browbeating/apathy continues.
The midlife crisis is probably better described as a change or unease in the self and not knowing why you get out of bed in the morning anymore and that entire adventure, whereas this anomie is the social environment you're moored to breaking down.
> Is that not the epitome of the classic mid life crisis?
I think there's a step change from say the silent gen/baby boomer generations where a midlife crisis was realizing you lived the classic "American Dream" but weren't going to be a rockstar or super wealthy, compared to now where a midlife crisis could easily be wondering if you will continue to have any economic value at all years before social security kicks in.
Admittedly this is America-centric, but that's my lived perspective, and also I recognize that things weren't always very stable even here, thus why I am comparing a couple of specific generations to the ones that followed.
There was, for a time when I was younger (as a Gen-Xer), just an assumed sense that each generation would have it better than the last. Naive, perhaps, but alas. And obviously far less people assume that anymore.
I thought it was possible a generation could have it worse off through an economic crisis or period of 70s style malaise, but I at least thought the government would attempt to improve the lives of its citizens. I didn't expect the ruling political party to be so aggressively trying to make our lives worse.
Don't forget that social security has been raided and won't even be available for those of us reaching middle age right now and the people we keep electing who say they will do something about it have shown over and over and over that they actually won't.
Anomie plus helplessness plus a feeling of a rug pull of the laws/equality/character of our country. I am not suicidal but wow I get it.
SS was not "raided" . Whatever made you think that is surely contributing to human misery. It's just running out because it's always been a scheme where the young pay the old and we have fewer young than old. The people getting SS payments, themselves paid into it! It's not any sort of raid, corruption, evil...
And it's actually fairly easy to fix if we raise the social security income tax cap. Next year it's $192,300. Raising that cap significantly (or even eliminating it) would extend solvency for quite a while longer.
Also to work so hard, and even when you have good luck as well, to see the people around you adapting their expectations so fast that they're blasé about what feels like amazing luck and success to you, and to realize that you can never satisfy them, only inevitably let them down when you experience setbacks.
+1. Also maybe it's an age where responsibilities start to peak. More senior positions in the workplace, having children, marriage, etc.
I've had a few stressful periods lately where it felt or feels like I can't load any more on to my plate and I don't even have that many responsibilities - no kids either, just an accumulation of small and background things needing dealt with. I think I do understand people who do commit suicide to an extent - if you add the above normal stresses of life to some highly stressful life events like a breakup or divorce and throw kids etc into the mix - and hey why not a pile of work related stress too - I can absolutely see how people get pushed to the edge.
Modern society has not been arranged in a way that sets people up for success. Staring at device screens for more hours year on year likely doesn't help.
I mean, I kinda like having kids. Even if everything goes in the shitter economically ag least I have something in front of me that is obviously going well.
if things go in the shitter economically, often the wife tries to take the kids. it's a brutal reality, but in this life men are universally valued for what they can provide. if they cant provide, time is ticking until society kicks them to the curb.
I have however run out of fucks and am ignorantly coasting and making optimal survival decisions only. Fuck the business. Fuck the career. Highly recommended.
Hah likewise. In the early 2003's I was accepted into two of the top compsci universities in Canada but was rejected by the government for a student loan (my parent's income was too high, the government said-- they should pay. thanks government, no shit).
So I put all my fucks into working my ass off. Started dishwashing. Became a cook. Then owned a bakery. Built up a portfolio, became a sysadmin for a large company. After 6 or 7 years the writing was on the wall that I'd be replaced with a call center and some low wagies so I left.
Been working a do-nothing laid back remote job for a year now and never happier. My only source of stress is thinking that giving a shit when I was young would actually lead somewhere when I had the rug pulled under me from the get-go.
Then owned a bakery.
That's my exit from software development.
Making cakes are much more soul fulfilling than writing code for soulless machines, let the machines write the code for themselves.
One day we get rid of the machines, scrap their metals to make plows to tend the fields.
Like the good old times.
Software development as a career was a utter mistake.
Corporations are a mistake.
Maybe AI can fix that, automate bureaucracy, put those useless managers out of work. But I doubt, the class division is too strong, they'll remove the bottom of the pyramid, but not the top.
I want to destroy the pyramid !
But I know just to wait, it will destroy itself because it can't understand human values.
All modern jobs are bullshit either way.
I'm sure some sociologists have written this already, but it seems to me that the people who commit suicide aren't those who are miserable and have few options. It's those who have lots and lots of options, but all options lead to unacceptably bad outcomes.
Microcredit in the third world is somewhat notorious for causing a rise in suicide rates. That fits the pattern: there's a huge number of things you can do to get money to pay back the loan, but if it gets out of hand, none of them get you remotely enough money to keep from sinking deeper into debt. Access to capital gives you many options - but it also makes it your fault when you didn't find the option which would lead you out of miserable poverty (which may not even exist!)
What any psychologist will probably tell you (at least, what all of them told me) is that clinical depression makes you bad at seeing options. Could it be that's in some sense a defense mechanism, trying to stop you from putting the really bad options on the table?
> I'm sure some sociologists have written this already, but it seems to me that the people who commit suicide aren't those who are miserable and have few options. It's those who have lots and lots of options, but all options lead to unacceptably bad outcomes.
People don't all commit suicide for the same reasons. Durkheim's book Suicide which in some ways created the idea of sociology itself categorizes four types of suicide.
Durkheim's classification works as a description, but doesn't seem very good to predict which groups will have high suicide rates. Suicide follows some very odd patterns. For instance
* Black Americans have low suicide rates, lower than white Americans, who in turn have lower than indigenous Americans.
* The children of actors and celebrities have high suicide rates.
* Men have higher suicide rates than women.
* Wealthier countries seem to generally have higher suicide rates than poorer countries, but inside a country the poor usually have higher suicide rate than the rich.
* People with schizophrenia have sky-high suicide rates
The only common thread I can think of is a sense of agency - which means thinking you have many options - with hopelessness. When you can do a lot (or at least you think you can, or society thinks you can), but none of it helps with the things that matter to you.
* Victims of racism may paradoxically be somewhat shielded from suicidal despair from low expectations. But when racism comes with heavy romanticizing (e.g. "noble savage", "ancient proud culture"), expectations are not low. Yet, it's all too understandable why someone would want internalize these romantic, often openly envied identities, even when they're completely at odds with their material situation. You can't live up to it yet you feel like it's all you have.
* Children of e.g. wealthy actors are materially very comfortable and safe, and clearly have lots of agency and choice - but what do they want, when they don't need to strive for wealth, any social acclaim they earn may be tainted by the suspicion that they didn't earn it fairly, and they in any case are unlikely to surpass their parents?
* One typical schizophrenia symptom is sense of agency disturbances. They often feel like they are in control of things they aren't, or don't have control of things which they do. The former, combined with seeing bad things happen (for instance on TV) can really devastate them.
Okay. Can you think of some groups which have a low sense of agency/few options, yet have a high suicide rate because of their lack of purpose and identity?
I'm looking for evidence against this theory, so I'm very interested if you can find it. But I think it's going to be hard, because they're going to be correlated: if you have a weak sense of self and purpose, then very likely your options will all seem bad too. And even if you have a strong sense of who you are and what your purpose is, failing to live up to the identity society and yourself assign to you (because all the options you have fail at living up to it) then you could well call that "having your identity taken away from your".
Part of working through history from (only) 100 years ago is an impression of how quickly societies were changing then. This isn't the first time we've had the table cleared, and it hopefully won't be the last.
Which isn't to downplay the upheaval that people are in - it is definitely traumatic. But we've been through disruption before. Hopefully we'll make fewer costly mistakes this time...
> This isn't the first time we've had the table cleared, and it hopefully won't be the last.
I don't think we should wish such evil upon future generations. The industrial revolution was a terrible time to live through, and arguably was not beneficial in the end to humanity. I would be very happy if we never had such a change again.
We can separate the table clearing from how we treat the players of the previous game.
We don't have many coal miners any more. How do we treat the people who used to be coal miners, when we get to 100% clean power? If we are running society well, we give them a hero's sendoff and a nice comfortable retirement life. If we are running society poorly, we take away their homes and healthcare to punish them for not having jobs any more.
I defined success for myself quite a few years ago: I want to leave the world better than I found it. No high aspirations, no figure. Just better than it was.
Some of that is political advocacy. Some of that is open source code that should exist. Some of that is helping a neighbor. I don't need to hit a certain bar, I just need to know that in a given interaction or situation, I am trying to make things... at least a little better.
That also scales well to differing life decisions. The video game I'm playing, can I get people to play a little nicer with each other and have more fun? Workplaces are full of dumb stuff, success is making it at least a little better. Turns out I have kids now. Wasn't the plan, but now my obligation is to make sure my involvement in their lives is positive. Not a specific bar I have to achieve, but you know, someday I hope someone appreciates how I chose to live my life.
"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch... to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!" - Emerson
No. All that would apply to women too. Men are abused in the West, oh for a few decades now. Women are taking all the college slots, taking most of the new job openings, having more sex and offspring, have more friends, are favored by the legal system, celebrated in the media rather than mocked and derided. Women have a lot of pent up rage after hundreds of years of their own abuse, now that the tables have turned, they are holding the whip hand now as it were…. It’s not anomie.
They aren't holding the whip unless you give them the whip. Biologically you are the one with leverage. Probably economically too. You're the one doing this to yourself. Either stop doing it to yourself, or stop complaining about it
I am not sure if the success per se is the issue, but today things are definitely harder for many people compared to, say, 50 years ago for people of the same age. The available options for you, at age 55, are less with regards to success in general. And then it depends a lot on one's life too; for instance, are they single or not, do they have kids or not, and so forth.
> It's a psychologically very difficult time.
That's true, though it depends on how one handles that. But I think it is also clear that there are fewer options available when you are somewhat old already. People at age, say 20 to 25, may not feel a problem when they are gamers. At age 55, it is much harder to reason as to why you may wish to invest many hours per day into games; it just is not that productive, for most people (excluding e. g. playing to have fun, but that still does not answer the question of producitivity; I exclude professional gamers here, as they can often make a living just from donations, twitch etc.. but most people are not like that. Some of these gamers soon hit the age range 50+ by the way, I do watch a few of them every now and then.)
maybe some just don't want to live that long. does everyone need to live as long as possible? you live your youth, and maybe that is enough for some.
if you start to hurt every day, get diagnosed with age-related disease, your cognition starts to deteriorate, etc, you might just decide "hey, i lived enough. i don't want to go through years of feeling like this."
I think about this increasingly often. I have accomplished much, and have seen much of the world. I have also lived through gruesome deaths in my family and have seen how aging in America, under American healthcare looks.
I retired in 2023, not because I could, but because I couldn't not. I'm almost 50. My parents died in their early 60s. I have some of their health problems, and some of my own. I also destroyed my back in a motorcycle accident many years ago and live with constant pain.
My favorite things to do, which bring my peace and joy, involve me sitting in a chair, which hurts my back. In my youth I rode my bicycle avidly, which now hurts my back. I love gardening, and if I do it too much, it hurts my back.
It became increasingly clear to me that my "purpose" in this country is to work until I die. I know that there are other countries, and other kinds of lives, but they are not where my wife and friends and life are.
I am happy, relatively healthy, and love life. I would like to live forever if I could. I know I could fill every minute of it with things I find interesting, even if it was just reading every single book.
But I've seen what American life looks like in your 60s and older, and it's not fucking pretty for most people.
Are you me? My old motorbike injuries are a little more distributed but -- like yours -- almost entirely crippling from the perspective of doing anything joyful; we're in the same bucket yearwise; and it sounds like we always visit the doctor with just the one bullet in the chamber.
Mostly just posting to say, hey, there's others out here like you. Hang in there, Almost-Me. If not, see you on the other side.
Deadlifts helped my chronic congenital back pain that is probably some combination of DDD and scoliosis and multiple herniations. Yes sometimes it pisses off the disks and I'm pretty useless for a day or two. And yes it has added some other problems. But overall I went from constant sharp pain nearly unable to remain seated, to occasional dull pain I can ignore, and rarely some really bad pain. Overall it's much better of a life.
Same here, really life changing for me with a back injury. I recommend hex bar deadlifts as they put much less pressure on the lower back than conventional ones. And front squats for the same reason.
Have to disagree there as it doesn't make much sense. The point is to strengthen the muscles of the back. Keeping a more vertical back angle directly reduces force on those muscles while keeping the same spinal compression. You want the opposite, to have maximal muscle involvement with minimal compression. Back extensions progressing to normal deadlifts are indicated.
I have done both extensively and heavy, and like you said yourself, with the barbell deadlift you will sometimes trash your back. Yes it does work the back muscles a little harder, but for me the extra risk isn't worth it. Also with the trap bar you can lift more weight so it balances out.
A hurting back on a bike might be an issue of bike fit. Bicycle touring is a hobby regarded as accessible to even the elderly, and indeed one often comes across people age 50-80 on popular routes. Many of them will complain about a bad back off the bike when doing other things like camping or carrying panniers, but a fitted bike should not strain one's back.
Have you heard of the book Healing Back Pain by Sarno? I haven't personally experienced it, but people seem to swear by it. A pretty non-traditional approach to pain management.
That's why Mishima topped himself at the age of 45: as a physical-conditioning buff and gay man, he came to a firsthand realization that it was all downhill from there. What you posted is very similar in spirit to the opening of his last novel.
For most people, the real physical deterioration doesn't have to kick in until age 65 or so (plus or minus). But you do have to show up every day and hit it hard. In the last triathlon I raced there were men in that age group still finishing with fast times. And they're not genetic freaks either, just consistent.
> A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game
Reminds me of this idea about sport / competition from the parenting book, The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik. She says that children must be encouraged to explore, not exploit ("play games"), without any end goal in mind. This lets them figure out the world around them and how they can affect it.
As "exploitation" (competition) is a means to use specific knowledge (performance) to achieve goals (progress), it will tend to have winners & losers. "Exploration", otoh, is choosing among umpteen pathways to growth and learning. Of course, middle-aged folks can seldom afford to not be playing games, but perhaps in times of change, they need to be exploring like children again.
That is a very interested lens to view this issue through, I hadn't considered that! I'm not quite that age, though I think my age can be discerned from my post history lol, but even outside of being generally impacted by this, the biggest impact I've felt has been how others around me are reacting. Half a dozen INCREDIBLE engineers that I used to work with left explicitly because they don't like how AI is changing the industry.
I don't know, it feels to me, in my limited scope of experience and view, that things are getting a lot worse, very quickly, and it frightens the hell out of me.
Wow just a short reading of this wikipedia is fascinating. It reminds me of a thought I had years ago about what is lost with the introduction of abstracted currency (i.e. dollars). I assume this is an established concept, but when you barter with someone, besides the transaction, you learn about what that person needs. With abstracted currency, this information doesn't get transferred.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I used to have plans for the future, I had the next couple of years mapped out. Then I tried AI and my plans simply dissolved. I have no idea what's going to happen now.
Feels like all the effort I put into coming this far was invalidated overnight. The writing is on the wall, and now I have about five years to get rich at any cost until it's all over. Now I'm firing from the hip in all directions, trying to hit something, anything.
I used to enjoy programming as a hobby, writing articles. It's all so meaningless now. What's the point?
I'm not sure a focus on getting rich is the answer, and you probably don't have 5 years before that window closes. I'm going to focus on trying to rebuild my business so that if other businesses were run the same way, we'd hopefully all keep most of our agency in the AI economy. If you can't build a business or a coop that way, activism on that front is probably a more valuable way to build yourself a brighter future.
I don't get why people say that they have X years to be rich. If the revolution is going to be that big, why do you believe that fiat money, real estate or even private property will be valid in that future? The owners of AI would have all the leverage, it doesn't matter how much money you have. And if AI is that revolutionary, it won't have owners
I don't know. I'm just trying to make the best possible decisions with the information available to me.
If we achieve a post-scarcity society, then nothing I do today matters. If we don't, then hopefully having money will lead to a better outcome than not having it.
Some of my friends found your post misogynic which I did not agree, causing a long discussion. It is due to the focus on the middle aged men. Do you think this challenges are gender specific?
> we are living through a period of time where success is very hard to define, much less attain.
Do you think this has changed from say 10 or 20 years ago? To me, I don't get the sense that there has been shift in the social definition of success. Maybe I'm missing something?
> Do you think this has changed from say 10 or 20 years ago?
Yes, I do.
The goal is roughly the same: financial security, a good home, as much of a family as one cares to raise.
But for basically my entire life as a middle-aged American, there was a well-lit path to that goal:
1. Do good in high school.
2. Go to a university and get some four year degree. Obviously some degrees are duds, but basically any of them was considered a worthwhile investment.
3. Get a white collar job doing something intellectual. Make a decent salary at a stable company. Change jobs periodically as needed.
Now:
1. Doing well in high school is still important, but it is very easy for kids to get good grades using AI while not actually learning anything and not realizing they are setting themselves up for hardship.
2. College is so expensive now that determining which college and which degree is actually a sound financial investment is very hard. An 18 year-old-kid is being asked to make a financial choice with life-long consequences at a point when they have none of the expertise about their long-term goals to know what to do.
3. AI will very likely eliminate many of these jobs. People will be competing for fewer and fewer jobs and who knows what on your resume will actually help you stand out? Also, most of the blue collar jobs are already gone, either automated away (ag) or moved overseas (manufacturing).
There was also a sense in the US that even if the government wasn't great, it was at least functional and a source of relative stability run by somewhat mature adults. That is clearly no longer the case at the federal level.
What's different is that people who thought they were basically on the "golden path" suddenly have no idea what their job looks like in five years or if it exists.
I agree for SWE specifically that AI is changing the career dramatically, and in a way that makes life less predictable. But I don’t know how the definition of success has changed - at least in America it still seems to be good professional job plus family.
Maybe spell it out in more detail? Forgive my inability to follow the argument.
My overall point is that what's happening in SWE right now is not happening (yet?) in other fields. And so we can't extrapolate from SWE experience to wider social experiance.
AI threatens to obliterate white-collar work entirely (whether it'll actually play out that way it's a possibility constantly talked about by executives and in the news), and that would plunge previously secure people into precarity. The idea this only applies to software engineers isn't true either.
There are numerous NDE reports that say people who commit suicide go through extreme agony after they die. It’s never an option. Tell this to anyone who thinks about this mistake and it may help him. Although he should do his own part of searching and listening to such stories to understand how big of a mistake this is.
true but the pieces we value are also being pried from our hands.
I also don't think it compares to the industrial revolution, these are primarily sociological conditions - these suicidality figures predate the current AI implications.
Sorry but it has very little to do with expectations. As a middle aged man you have very little opportunity to start a new career (regardless if there is even any remaining soon). In an absolutely objective way, physically and socially.
Yup, I tell my partner all the time. I just want the new era to be here already. I hate this waiting. I'm very annoyingly optimistic and think we're headed for post-scarcity.
In wealthy first-world countries we're already post-scarcity to a first approximation for stuff like food, clothing, and consumer electronics (I do understand that a minority of people are still desperately poor). But the stuff that people really covet will always be scarce. For example, AI can't create new real estate in prime locations.
I'm a bit of an AI pessimist, but creating new prime locations is one thing I do think AI could feasibly do. I have been involved in regeneration projects for 30 years and so many of the limiting factors could theoreticslly be eliminated by AI.
Eh, I don't think today is really all that different from the last 100 years. We as software engineers may feel different as it's (maybe) our turn in the barrel.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure from my understanding of human history and primate evolution that "long-term sexual/romantic partner" is, in fact, one of the basics.
I had an assumption that most of human history, marriage was more of an arranged marriage thing. With a lot of "women being treated as property", "heirs required for transfer of wealth", etc notation.
And there were also societies that were polyamorous in nature?
We are in a new world now, there is no need to force traditions (or worse yet, false traditions) that frankly doesn't seem to work anymore
My brother works in video production and I have some (very outdated at this point) history in that area.
* Video files are absolutely huge compared to basically every other domain. Just dealing with media is not trivial in the way that we take for granted in software. It's easy to fill terabytes for a production. Just copying stuff around can be a noticeable logistics problem. People still mail hard drives.
* A lot of people working in video production are there to be artistic creators and are not very technical. They are often extremely skilled at producing beautiful work using specific tools, but they often don't have the computer fundamentals we presume.
* Unlike the software world which increasingly a small number of very large companies who can invest heavily in centralized processes and tools, the video world still has a lot of small companies.
* Margins are very narrow and many of these small businesses are barely scraping. Production gigs can be very feast-or-famine.
Put all that together, and it's not at all surprising that a lot of productions don't have the backup discipline you would expect.
I have worked in film production professionally for 2 decades. And yes many productions don’t, but this isn’t some scrappy indie operation and 9 times out of 10 even those follow 3-2-1 or comparable.
Respectfully, but I think you are not introspecting deeply enough here.
Why is cooking enjoyable? Some of it may be purely the tactile sensation of stirring spoons in goop. I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
You wouldn't take a gondola to the top of a mountain because you want to be a person who can climb mountains. How much of that desire comes from purely internal accomplishment versus wanting to be seen as a person who can do that hard thing? And what happens to that drive when no one around you cares?
Anthony Gatto was arguably the world's best numbers juggler for many years. Now he runs a concrete company, because it turns out most people just don't really give a shit about juggling. It's not enough for a task to be hard, it needs to be esteemed too.
> Perhaps we will value eachother on an even more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.*
How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything? How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships. But given that candy companies are some of the largest private companies in the world, I know that human nature means many people really will just check out and turn into vegetables.
Humans are like border collies. We need some amount of work and struggle to be psychologically healthy. If AI really does deliver us a post-scarcity life (unlikely, given the infinite greed of many of the elites), then I think a whole lot of people are going to lose their minds.
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