[azemetre]

It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job.

It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.

[mlsu]

These conversations where highly paid software people complain about insanely minor things (the code linter is the worst part of your job??) are actually kind of nice to read, in a funny way.

The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.

[ryandrake]

Yea, that linter thread was wild! Sometimes I think we are totally pampered and out of touch!

I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics factory where the chemical stench left my nose nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.

I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.

[chasd00]

I don't mean to pile on but i feel the same when software devs here talk about how becoming a farmer is their salvation from their workplace suffering. As a kid I remember watching my cousin lie on his back with a stick welder underneath a horse trailer in 105F Texas summer heat. No thanks, i'll stick with my coffee, desk, and computer.

edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.

[Karrot_Kream]

A lot of the folks working in these bigger tech companies didn't grow up this way. A lot of them grew up in wealthy families, lived in wealthy neighborhoods, were pushed into an elite tech career by their parents, went to elite pre-university schooling, elite universities, etc and have never had to feel monetary scarcity. Just look at HN comments and see how many 3rd generation programmers there are. As an adult with savings working at bigger tech companies and never having experienced hardship or poverty as a child, the prospect of following your dream feels alluring.

I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their parents' social circles into a tech career and never were wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I know what it's like to keep a job a job.

I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most of your time is spent coordinating rather than building, and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I don't hate, working with generally smart people, alternating between a cushy office and my home where outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor office perks. It's fantastic.

[uh_uh]

As a counterpoint to that, I grew up in a blue-collar family under modest circumstances and I still feel like bigcorp software development is soul-crushing. Surely, you appreciate it for a while. But eventually the reality of it sets in, and can't ignore the BS anymore.

I know I'm luckier than most humans on Earth, but still hedonistic adaptation is a thing, even if you grew up in a poor family.

[chiggsy]

>For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.

Backbreaking manual labor sucks. The heat. The cold. The shit. The frost. I'll format my fucking code any way you tell me to to avoid farm life. Like I give a shit. A week in and I won't even notice. Ah Christ, the smell of cow pus ...nyaagggggh.

As for woodworking: You will get cut, there is no hope of avoiding it, and no telling how bad it's going to be. The next day, we will see how serious your woodworking gig really is. You gotta be out there, bub. Get it stitched up and keep on cranking out the pieces.

[mlsu]

Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?

I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have lost his money -- luck carries that "should have" connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-sum connotation, because we always mean someone is privileged in relation to another, which introduces almost an adversarial tone to it.

For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not really harder than any other reasonable person. I was born in the right zip code, to the right family, had access to an amazing education, had the stability in my life to pursue it. Fortune.

I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish most people could have fortune in their lives. If the price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is down today, so be it!

[spacephysics]

The illusion paradigm

By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish

“I’ll be truly happy WHEN”

When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done”

Fully agree, it’s a state of mind.

I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress

[bccdee]

> rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy

I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.