[Consultant32452]

I dunno, I find it off putting when the 1% complain about how tough their lives are. It would be more palatable if it were surrounded by intense gratitude they are afforded off the backs of the less fortunate who are doing the grinding work of keeping the world functioning. But the gratitude is practically nonexistent.

[glangdale]

If we reach a point where, to paraphrase the Situationist International, "the last Koch brother is strangled with the guts of the last Sackler", I'll feel a lot better about people like you attacking members of the professional upper middle class for having the termerity to complain that working life isn't all that fun ("hey, at least you're not picking through a garbage heap on Manilla"). Until then, it seems a bit misplaced.

[Consultant32452]

Yes, you have it better than almost anyone who has ever existed in the history of the planet, but there's no need for an ounce of gratitude for that as long as someone else might be even better off.

[RugnirViking]

Theres a reason that accountants of old are characterised as sullen and miserable people, and its not because they were poor. Happiness for the most part is resiliant to physical hardship - happiness indexes among countries are almost completely unrelated to GDP.

Working this kind of mental & menial work clearly is missing something important that I'm confident we will one day understand a lot better. Perhaps its simply relative position (keeping up with the Joneses), or maybe its a need for much more movement (it's well understood that zoo animals need to be given very large areas in order to be happy and yet we often sit in spaces that would be illegal to keep animals our size in for the majority of our days)

Maybe it's access to nature itself - I often feel a lot better after taking some time to walk alone in nature, but perhaps this is because of something else than just simply nature itself. On the days where I remember to take a moment to step outside of the office, or just take a break from routine and do something slow-paced for the sake of it, such as taking a detour on the way to somewhere just for the sake of seeing what that way looks like, I find that I feel much happier for the rest of the day. However, this lacks an explanation for why I don't do this often and feel good all the time. My concious brain knows it is a good thing, but my concious brain is rarely in charge.

Maybe it's just that people need tasks on a different scale to those we work on nowadays. This I think hits a lot of people. I used to work at a campsite for a while, where I would spend the day cutting down a tree, or moving a pile of gravel. Whatever I was doing, it would take at most a couple days, and it was usually either just me or me and a couple guys around me. This diversity of tasks and short time to completion really made me feel much better. I also often think that removing tasks such as washing the dishes or repairing clothes meant that we overspecialise, which is removing even more of these such short and easy wins.

Perhaps its also the need to feel useful in a profound way. I often think about how before the internet it was possible to gain a reputation locally for being good at someting. How had the guy who fixed clothes, another who was good at tying ropes, etc. Often these skills would be unrelated to work, and I believe would have an important role in having a self-identity. Nowadays we naturally get fit into a single stereotype by our family and friends based on our line of work, but at work everybody is that way, and so a conflict with our idea of self arises that makes us feel worthless even if we know the work we are doing is useful. Perhaps somehow, we need to feel that we aren't replaceable.

I also think that there is an aspect of physical work just being less tiring, or at least in a different way. When I used to work a manual job, I would feel exhausted after the day, but in a way that meant that the next day I would wake up without feeling drained. I had no trouble getting out of bed or finding the energy to cook, clean etc. The tiredness was in my aching muscles, but it didn't affect my decision making nearly as profoundly. It's nothing like the brain fog that causes me now to come home and need the sensation of something forgettable and mindless like youtube or video games.

[RugnirViking]

Theres this fundamental idea we have as a society that people are fundamentally able to do as they please at all times, which is pretty much just a lie. Almost the entire time we are awake, our body is doing things without us consciously deciding to do them. Only afterwards our brain spends time rationalising itself and constructing a sort of post-hoc rationalisation.

It's amazingly adept at this, to the point where usually you don't notice that you didn't actually decide to do that thing. The only time you might notice is in the case of strong addictions, where people try to go cold turkey and describe literally watching themselves in horror as they go back to the think they are actively trying to avoid.

What this leads do is an idea that successful people have which is that less well off people could sort themselves out by doing a particular thing, say, managing their money better. Or maybe its just the people who know many languages and look down on those who know few. Or maybe yourself, trying to stick to a diet plan and not being able to understand how you yourself can want one thing but do another.

Turns out, we are pretty much a function of our environment. We have a concept of something called "willpower" which is something where we can carry on despite our body needing respite, but only a little bit. This I think happens when we are using our conscious mind to complete tasks instead of our autopilot mode. This works, but is quickly draining and really doesn't last that long.

I think this kind of thing is where some of the stigma around mental health comes from. We have this idea that people are at all times acting according to what they simply want to be doing, whereas they are usually acting on autopilot , which is sometimes sort of close to what we want to be doing, but has a tendency in modern times to get stuck in loops of stuff like eat>sleep>work that make us feel worse which causes us to have less energy which causes us to just want more sleeping and eating rather than fixing the problem by breaking out of the cycle.

If we as a society aknowledged better how 99% of our actions are essentially done unconsciously, and then later sort of added together by our self aware part of the brain, I think people would be much more understanding of mental health issues - if someone behaves in a way counter to their own interests, its not because they are stupid, they are literally just unfortunate vitims of a sort of cyclical pattern of their bodies in their local environment.

We are kind of along for the ride in our own bodies a lot more than we might like to think, with only a small ability to push buttons to nudge ourselves in the directions we want

So you literally can't decide to just stop being in the kind of glitches in the autopilot that cause something as big as depression or as small as getting up early when you're tired. You only have a small amount of influence, and you have to spend it in ways that end up multiplying themselves by your autopilot thingy like deciding to give yourself good sleep, or food if you focus your willpower on those kinds of things, you end up with more willpower but sometimes even things as small as this require a lot more energy than you might be able to muster all at once, so you have to do even smaller things to build that up for example in the modern day deciding to interrupt yourself in the middle of a task is incredibly hard you could be working and know that you should be in bed but you just keep going because it takes more mental energy to interrupt yourself than you have and so you end up tired, and have that same low amount of energy the next day

[chillwaves]

This is a primary core concept in mindfulness/meditative practices. That and to disassociate with our thoughts and minimize our ego.

[RugnirViking]

Sorry I hate to be the kind of person that is just philosophising publicly like this. It's just something that I think about a lot.

I guess the rambling and wandering nature of my thoughts are visible in the writing itself given I was writing without thinking (ironically)

[andrepd]

You can have gratitude for what you have and strive for improvements.

[Consultant32452]

Which do you think makes it to the front page most around here, gratitude or complaints? Do you think the people posting to and reading HN tend to be on the more privileged or less privileged ends of the economic/health/education/well being spectrum?

[VyperCard]

I'd wish i was one of the 1%

[sacado2]

Fun fact: you only need $32,400 to be part of the 1%.

Source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...

[Consultant32452]

Global 1% is about $34k. $100k gets you to the 14th percentile in the US. $150k gets you to the 94th percentile.

If you're a developer in the first world, you're incredibly rich and privileged not just by historical standards, but by real world modern standards.

[glangdale]

Global 1% is a daft standard for, well, anything. Most of those $34k in a first world country are going to be spend chasing goods that are incredibly expensive by both historical and real world modern standards (positional goods and goods subject to Baumol's cost disease).

This leads to a bizarre narrative (especially roping in 'historical standards') - "hey, your health care may be dire, your education is haphazard, your food is non-nutritious and repetitive, and your living situation is precarious, but you have TV and better plumbing than a king from 100 years ago".

[Consultant32452]

You're comparing what's real to a fantasy you have in your mind. I'm comparing what's real to what's real. There's room for both. Utopian fantasy is nice because it helps us think about the future we want to build. But I don't understand why there seems to be no gratitude for where we are.

[glangdale]

Yes, awareness of positional goods and Baumol's cost disease is usually the mark of a utopian fantasist.

You seem fixated on this schoolmarmish "gratitude" angle to the point that you don't want to think about not just the future we want to build but the actual prevailing situations in the countries we are living in now. Roping 'global' comparisons into discussions of first world disadvantage represents a subtraction from the level of understanding, not an acknowledgement of "what's real". As a cartoonish and extreme example, you can be a bum on the sidewalk in NY collecting 10x as much as an African subsistence farmer takes in, but your take won't buy you somewhere to live, health care, etc.

Excessive global/historical comparisons generally ignore the fact that you can't travel to the other side of the world (or hop in a time machine) to buy cheap goods and escape the local cost of positional goods. Somewhere in Vietnam, there's a teacher who could teach your kid computer science and math for a fraction of the cost of, say, NY. You could buy a mansion in the south of France circa 1850. So what?

[Consultant32452]

If you could choose to live anywhere in the world at any point in history, not knowing what kind of body you'd be born into (gender, race, height, disability, family income, etc.) when and where would you choose? If you choose any time other than right now and anywhere other than a fairly small number of nations I think you simply don't know much at all about history or even "prevailing situations in countries we are living in now."

Sure, there are almost certainly some poor people reading HN who have tough lives in places where it's dangerous and/or there may be food scarcity or other serious systemic issues. But by and large we're rich Westerners. You mentioned the proverbial NY bum. Do we have more posts on the front page talking about how to help the bum, or insufficient cubicle walls? That's my point. I'm not saying that these concerns aren't worth some attention. But I think we might be out of balance around here.

[chillwaves]

I would rather be making less in a country with universal health care and subsidized housing. Making more but living on the knife's edge is not my idea of freedom.

[scarface74]

Just to provide a citation:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4109731-united-states-incom...

But, I have to take a step back and realize how fortunate I am sometimes. I’m not making anywhere near Silicon Valley salary but I never felt like I was in the top n% because I live around a lot of people who I know make more than I do.