No, it's not. The message is "This is my experience."
I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess."
Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard, and to be understood, and to have their existence as an individual human being validated. When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.
The author said as much in her last sentence: "It’s the work I want to own." But there's no way to make that connection to readers who are accustomed to thinking of the big picture without trivializing the little picture.
Many of us write to communicate facts. When we read, we expect the writer to be doing that, too. We get frustrated if they take far too long to deliver on too little payload of facts.
But sometimes other people write to communicate feelings, not facts. Sometimes I see this in my marriage. My wife says something, and my reaction is, "So?" But she wanted me to share in the experience, not just to know something. If I listen just for facts, I miss what she's trying to tell me.
Now, for those of us who are fact-oriented, it gets annoying to have people talking to us the "wrong" way (i.e., not our style) all the time. But we need to be able to learn to handle the other style, at least at the level of a somewhat-fluent foreign language. (I say so, who does not do very well at this...)
> When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.
Oliver Sacks's late writing is of the latter type you describe, and various eulogies type of writing occasionally popped up on HN as well. So I don't think it's just the type of the writing that isn't well received here.
Some'll get it already. The HN community isn't one monolithic hivemind, it's a bunch of people who each have their own perspectives. But I'm trying to connect with the people who don't, who still think in terms of the big picture, and so my comment needs to be phrased in the same terms that it complains about. It's hard to make a perspective shift, because you are trying to see things that, by definition, you did not see before.
I remember wrestling with this when a friend of mine posted her personal experience, as a woman and as a psychologist and as someone who has been discriminated against, a year or so ago, and she said "You're a hero for making the effort. I mean that."
Many messages could be inferred but the title gave more than enough subtext to give the author's/publisher's intent.
What I gathered from this is that the author is making bad career choices and people in her family are prone to making bad choices.
She can't handle a woman laughing at her, so she decides to be a writer like her father. Seems like not growing up and having poor decision-making skills is what's stopping her upward mobility.
Buzzfeed is full of examples of this idea: I should be able to do what I want for a living because I want to do it, and it should make me upwardly mobile.
> author is making bad career choices and people in her family are prone to making bad choices.
It's the standard mantra however it's not true. The reason it's not true is that there is a labor market. The labor market can be generalized as being controlled by a few variables. Those variables are significantly in greater control of those with money than those without money.
Upward mobility is possible if and only if you can provide services that are valued highly, and when some labor is valued highly then those with money who have their hands deep in the political economy try to find ways of reducing the cost by for instance lobbying the government to increase the number of people getting educated in those fields, increasing research and development to try to automate those jobs, buying more technology to reduce the cost, increasing immigration and so on.
So yes you can try to get ahead, but it's a fact that the deck is stacked against you. Those with money want to get richer and they know they do it by exploiting people by paying them as little and making as much money from whatever they produce and keep that it in their pockets rather than paying for them anything higher than the market will bear, and even then we find them colluding with each other as in the case of Apple and Google to not compete with each other lest they drive up the cost of employment.
So yes your advice is common fare, but few people get ahead and that's because the people with money always working to keep it that way... and increase the skew.
Even now they are selling the idiot masses the dreams of automation while anyone with any sense knows automation is horrible for upward mobility and a way for those with money to end class war once and for all in their favor. Yet the masses have been seduced to allow it to happen. If they were thinking logically they would be like Luddites and resist it with all that they have disposal.
But then the counter argument is that something might happen that makes the system work after all, for instance minimum income which will then be determined by continued class warfare after this battle is over, which again is on the side of those with capital, or Capitalists.
I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess."
Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard, and to be understood, and to have their existence as an individual human being validated. When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.
The author said as much in her last sentence: "It’s the work I want to own." But there's no way to make that connection to readers who are accustomed to thinking of the big picture without trivializing the little picture.
Related video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM-gZintWDc