[pdimitar]

Very romantic, until you realize that nowadays working on what you like won't even pay your rent + utilities + food.

I am beginning to think we need HN for non-privileged people. A lot of "insights" on this forum come off as extremely deluded and living in a very positive bubble.

Now tell me, how do I get a huge break from programming while never losing a penny from my income? "Live within my means" would be your response perhaps? I still want to buy a house though.

Like come on. Sometimes I also wonder if people didn't start using ChatGPT for commenting on HN for clout.

[phone[phone]]

Some people never watched Dirty Jobs and you can see it in posts like the grandparent.

Having a job you clock into, giving your best effort at that job, stopping work at 5 PM, and then going home and do the things you're passionate about that don't pay the bills is the way that the vast majority of people live. It's only the rich and deluded that think that this isn't the reality for most people, and that's because they're so disconnected from what it's like as an actual member of the working class.

Big petite bourgeoisie masquerading as a worker going on here.

[bluefirebrand]

Honestly this is something I find working as a software developer in offices... Many of my peers have never worked shitty jobs.

I've worked fast food, I've worked retail (during the launch of the Wii, even, which was an insane time), I've detailed cars, I've worked in a call center.

That's just what I had to do to avoid being buried under student debt.

I think a lot of people working in offices never had this experience. If they worked at all during high school or university it was cushy office jobs wherever their parents worked.

This doesn't generally apply to immigrants, though. That's a whole other thing.

[Shocka1]

I agree wholeheartedly, and maybe a bit to the extreme. Worked in pizza shops and factory jobs in and out of HS until I figured out I really didn't want to do that type of stuff the rest of my life. So I enlisted in the 2000s and carried a rifle for five years, one of those for a year in the ME. It was terrible, but it paid for a CS Bachelor/Masters and gave me a perspective on how shitty things really can be.

I am completely aware of my viewpoint being extreme and keep myself in check when someone presents something that I would consider a first world problem. But make no mistake, many people in the US and Western world should be counting their blessings much more often.

[MrDresden]

I think you are overlooking how in this modern economy many people do in fact go and work their next job at 17:30 rather than going home to relax.

Dirty Jobs may show some some clocking in and out of only one job and then going home to relax but as a television show that is highly selective of what it decides to show it is not a representative window into how the mass amount of people on this planet live (just like HN is not such a window either).

Simply reading the local news tells me more about the economic hardships of the common worker than a reality tv and internet forums ever could. And those hardships are harsh in many cases.