I’ve wrestled with this idea since reading My Side of The Mountain when I was quite young. Our society and culture constantly reinforces the perceived need to make enough money to retire one day, assuming that there is a necessary amount of money one needs to continue living and that one should stop working at some point. The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe and be able to live a long health life. My rampant consumption and desire to live a “full” life, like those that I see posted on social media, also stoke this financial insecurity mindset—“I must have more so that I can do more so that people will know that I am fulfilled and then I will feel happy and fulfilled.”
> The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe
It wasn't an accident. Near as I can tell there is a not-insignificant part of the American psychological context that amounts to a threat of utter destitution should you not choose to keep slaving away. By Krom, America needs homeless people to show you just how far you can fall unless you keep serving the man.
I'm coming to terms with the fact that if I want to leave any inheritance at all I will need to be voluntarily turning down medical care at some point in my life. I'm only 30 and I know for certain that lifespan is not the parameter I want to optimize. Rather, it is quality of life.
That's definitely true, and I think it's good you realize it so young.
It's inherent because of the diminishing returns for aggressive healthcare intervention. We're all going to die. We could ramp up the costs of intervention to arbitrary levels in a final death spasm, but we will still die. So, we have to strike some kind of balance.
The harder part, I think, is thinking about the decades leading up to that final end game. How do you trade off quality of life in different decades by saving and time-shifting some of your spending power into the future. It's not just medical costs but all the other aspects of life which carry a mix of predictable and unpredictable costs.
I hope to solve it through the healthy lifestyle: diet, exercises, sleep, outdoor time, stress management, so I will be healthy and active for a long time until some organ suddenly fails, so I won't spend money on medical care which observes my slowly fading body while giving some not necessary helpful treatment.
Turning down medical care at some point in your life maybe the right thing to do.
I bet if you were to ask most doctors, one of the most heartwrenching things they are required to do is keep people alive and in pain long past the point of compassion.
I am not advocating for euthanasia, but within the last 2 years I have observed such cruelty only once averted
> lifespan is not the parameter I want to optimize. Rather, it is quality of life.
Fortunately, the 2 are often correlated, the best ways to prepare for a long lifespan are the same as preparing for a long health span, and that includes a high quality of life.
True, and that's why I wish there was a greater focus on preventative care in the US. Takes a lot of motivation to get a physical when things are mostly fine.
I'm working on the habits I have most direct control over: healthy eating, cardio exercise and reducing stress.
Most people agree with you until the moment they actually have to decide between further treatment and likely death. Most people simply hold on until they have no choice but to die.
Is there some kind of reader-mode filtering site one can put a URL in to get a version that undoes this extra effort to remove capital letters? From what I’ve gotten of this piece I think it’s up my alley, but reading it is unpleasant.
[edit] incidentally, if this fad doesn’t burn out soon we’re going to need a setting to fix it under the heading of accessibility. I expect there are several categories of people for whom this is even more annoying than for most of us, and who can’t just get over it or re-train their brain to do better without the very-useful cues provided by capital letters, notably dyslexics.
>'The Art of Asking Your Boss For A Raise' by French experimental author Georges Perec is best read aloud. It’s a theatrical piece with dazzling, recursive language that evokes laughter and pity at 'your' plight as you tackle the practical and emotional burden of asking for a much needed (if not deserved) pay increase while in the employ of one of France’s largest companies.
>The entirety of the book's 80 pages are one sentence, without punctuation, capitalization or spatial breaks.
I suspect much of the reaction is that it seems a little pretentious, like a faux optimization along the lines of "Oh I'm soooo busy, no time for caps", etc.
Couldn’t read it & didn’t want to make the extra effort required to. Every message, paragraph, article, blog post or company missive I’ve ever read that deliberately went the extra mile to remove capitalisation was written by the type of “change for the sake of change is always better” numpty who is not yet mature enough to have any insights worth sharing.
I always think these kinds of mentalities are based on people who have never been in dire straits or financially insecure. Living a simple life is almost impossible, pursuing wealth is probably the only way to be secure in a simple life. Even if you FIRE, you need to pretty aggressively pursue wealth at the beginning to make it work.
> Living a simple life is almost impossible, pursuing wealth is probably the only way to be secure in a simple life.
Maybe this seems true if you live in SF or NYC or are surrounded by people who are continuously preaching "high acheivement", but there indeed many people who lead a simple life. They don't have all the comforts that they could otherwise have if they pushed themselves to have more money, but they earn enough at their job for their own modest needs and contentment. It's the feeling that you always have to be reaching for the next rung in the ladder that creates anxiety.
I live in Canada, 2 hours from Toronto and a 1 bedroom apartment is CAD2300 per month. Working is not enough to afford that, you need to be somewhat affluent to afford rent and groceries. I think this idyllic idea of life is only possible outside of US/Canada/most of Europe.
It’s pretty easy to live a simple life if you don’t expect cutting edge healthcare, the best education for one’s kids’, and living in colder/flatter places.
If you expect a better than average quality of life, then you will have to compete for it. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to be bequeathed a sufficiently large portfolio.
Most people, myself included, struggle to understand what actually makes us happy, what our needs truly are, and how to balance the pressures of the world around us (real or perceived, necessary or irrelevant).
We leave a lot on the table in terms of doing less and getting more — meaning, contentment, joy, safety — from our lives.
Maybe just for now?
Imagine if China start hiring all the laid off engineers. The US companies would need to start hiring again, paying even more than the first round.
> Cool but who is going to support me while this happens?
I don't know. Is this some arrangement you have had in your life? Being supported by others wasn't never an option for me, I will not expect to be the case now that my chosen career doesn't look as great anymore. I live frugally (after losing everything creating a startup) and saved most of my salary in the past 5 years tho which now gives me some space to breath and plan for the next breakthrough. If things get better again, you should use the current terrible position you are in as a reference to also save most of your salary if you get a good job in tech.
Of course it was never an option, how can you even ask. We the men either provide or are thrown aside, as you are well-aware.
Mine was a bit of a snarky question admittedly. As said above (and I just noticed I made a typo or a grammar mistake, not sure which of both as I typed on the phone), I get your idea but nobody cares how are people supporting themselves during transitional periods. :(
My reaction as well. Sure, one can have a fulfilling life without always chasing more, more more and it is might be worth thinking about cutting out some excessive consumerism, but this...
breakfast in bed on a sunday morning- sticky buns and black coffee, sharing a bed with my best friend. having more children. walking through the park while listening to the sounds of nature and kids laughing in the playground nearby. decompressing after a day at work on the couch with a cat who nestles besides my belly while i read, sip hot tea, and listen to tender jazz. cooking pasta for dinner, drinking wine, slow dancing in the kitchen with a lover. maybe starting a garden. farmers markets on weekends carrying a wicker basket full of apricots and hydrangeas. a soft, romantic, simple existence.
... this is the life of a wealthy retired person.
Most people who have a job where they aren't influencers, don't achieve anything, just go in for 8 hours a day and do ordinary work, are earning ordinary money, living in a small apartment, no pets allowed, have a marginally reliable car, can't afford to shop at the farmer's market, and with kids and homework and laundry and daily chores just want to get some sleep at the end of the day, spending three hours on cooking and enjoying a slow dinner with wine and music just isn't going to happen.
> Most people who have a job where they aren't influencers, don't achieve anything, just go in for 8 hours a day and do ordinary work, are earning ordinary money, living in a small apartment, no pets allowed, have a marginally reliable car, can't afford to shop at the farmer's market, and with kids and homework and laundry and daily chores just want to get some sleep at the end of the day, spending three hours on cooking and enjoying a slow dinner with wine and music just isn't going to happen.
In what world does making pasta take 3 hours? If you wanted to be fast, making pasta is literally a 10 min endeavor. “Slow” could mean spending an hour… or 30 mins. Nothing there is unreasonable.
There’s plenty to be gleaned from shirking the “keeping up with the Jones’s” mentality and being able to enjoy with less. Maybe that less isn’t true poverty, but even then there’s plenty of ways to foster contentment.
When people say “make pasta” they typically mean make a pasta dish. This could mean nothing more than cooking dried pasta and incorporating premade sauce. Even making your own sauce doesn’t need to take long for a super tasty sauce. I assume your wife is talking about making fresh pasta, which is not common nor what I would immediately assume someone means when they say “make pasta” for dinner.
It reminds me of the average “indie hacker” mentality: just move to Bali and live off $2-3k.
The problem is that it just doesn’t work once you are past a certain age, and suddenly have “adult life”: parter, kids, aging parents.
I’d love to life a “little life”. Read books with my partner, drink coffee in the morning while watching the birds. The problem is that one small unlucky event, like being laid off, or someone you love getting sick, and it can all snowball into oblivion.
And the realistic thing to accept is that money solves a lot of problems. And in order to make enough of it, one should forgo the luxury if “little life” to some extent.
Because they are their own individuals, and they have their own life based on their own experiences. And while I can suggest, or even influence a little, their life choices -- I can't command them to change themselves 180 degrees.
Sometimes I feel like we, as society, became so detached from each other and from reality. Maybe it's because of social networks that keep pumping up the idea that everyone can be rich by investing $5 a day instead of buying Starbucks, or that the path to financial freedom is as simple as "just buy a house and rent it for $5k a month"; or that people suddenly started to call randoms in Twitter their friends. But I feel like people lost the ability to be empathetic towards others. They simply are unable to see and accept that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different set of rules that the ones they grew up under.
> Because they are their own individuals, and they have their own life based on their own experiences
it sounds like you need to make a choice to allow them to eat your life (spend your limited years of your life as race rat to satisfy their habits instead of "little life" if it is preference) or reject them.
> They simply are unable to see and accept that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different set of rules that the ones they grew up under.
sorry, I don't understand how this claim(which I also don't understand why you put it here) connected to $5 starbucks and renting a home. Maybe you could expand?
While I was trying to find a partner, at one point I realized that if I wanted to experience life in Asia or Africa, it would be a lot harder to do so if I got married before going there. Since I was still alone at the time I decided to postpone my search and move first.
Now I took my children to Africa precisely so they can see and understand that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different conditions than the ones they themselves experienced so far.
Yes. Money is being able to support my family. Money is a safety net. Money is choices. I'd take a little life, but only if it comes with a Big paycheck.
with all due respect this cannot be further from the truth. americans are taught from young age that to make it in life they must increase their earnings. america needs modern day slaves working in cubicles 9-10 hours per day (even if you are at FAANG making high six figures you still a slave…).
but economics which america would not dream teach their young is that you can also cut expenses :) this is the quiet life part that you missed in the post… how much money do you think you need to make to have an insane level-of-comfort life in say Hope, Arkansas…?
I think this is a very entitled approach, I bet you need very little to live in a small rural area, but the crazy thing is that not everyone can do that since by definition if would get more expensive for everyone to do that. We can't all live off the grid away from people, modern infrastructure just cannot support that.
I think if the approach was, be happy with less, then sure we can get on board. There is a massive difference in being able to afford more and choosing less, than being forced to have less.
How many jobs are in Hope, Arkansas? And I mean real jobs, not building React garbage from a coffee shop. How many people are in Hope, Arkansas, especially people you could easily connect with? How much housing is in Hope, Arkansas? How many doctors? Are there specialists? How are the schools?
I'm so sick and tired of the techbro response to a rising cost of living and a lower quality of life is just "lol be poor :)". There's a reason half the country cheered when that CEO got shot. Maybe there just isn't enough Hope in Arkansas.
it is 2025 mate, you do not have to work in Hope to live in Hope… geeeeeez
as far as all the other questions, ask yourself the same for an urban area too :) and yes, there are great schools, great doctors, everything you need is there or a short ride away.
I am not surprised by your reply, expected to see many more, brainwashing is strooooong in the USA and these are very predictable responses
when you have no control over your life, when you can get paged on your honeymoon or your kids birthday, when you need to ask permission to take time off… as society we are past what was slavery back in the day - now we got modern-day slavery, working for THE MAN
I don't remember ever asking permission to take time off.
I just put the days I'm going to be out on the calendar and inform my team/boss/manager after the fact.
And these weren't cushy FAANG jobs either. Just your typical run of the mill IT-adjacent roles.
> when you can get paged on your honeymoon or your kids birthday
Yes, you can be paged, but if you set your boundaries, you don't have to respond to the page. Again, I don't remember ever jumping up and treating something like that as an emergency. Always prioritized my own errands first.
I just put the days I'm going to be out on the calendar and inform my team/boss/manager after the fact.
why do you have to do that? who is this “boss” of yours that needs to know about what you do?
as long as you work for someone you are owned and exploited. if we had a nice chat meeting each other irl and we broached the subject of compesation and you said “I am L76 at Netflix making $965k” I am would be immensely happy for you but would think “this lovely mate is actually worth $1,500,000 and just doesn’t even know it”
>as long as you work for someone you are owned and exploited.
Truly, are you this deluded and bereft of perspective? Making such a claim about the vast majority of modern workers in the developed world is not only completely off the rails but also an insult to the real meaning of slavery and those who suffer it or have.
You've never exchanged money for someone elses labor in your life? Or had someone pay you to deliver your labor? Are you so privileged as to have never done either and thus live in a bubble that allows you to believe such nonsense as the above?
Feudal peasants weren't slaves. Employees aren't slaves. Serving someone makes you a serf in the worst case, not a slave.
If you were a FAANG slave, Google could literally prevent you from marrying, or ship you in a box to a different country without warning, or just kill you if you're no longer passing the bar.
Ok, no capital letters as a writing affectation is immediately upsetting... but I'll let my anxiety about that subside and focus on the content.
I get it, I really do. I find it a daily struggle. Last week I told my boss I couldn't travel this week. He was fine about it, there wasn't even a discussion. But I've worried about it ever since. Not because I want a raise or a promotion, but because I need this job and I worry that I won't get another good one if I lose it. I need it to cover my families needs, I need it so that I can live a good life post work. I need to think about post work because we all know that when your hair goes white and you struggle with the accessibility of the office you're not going to get another one.
So, there is no compact that will create the feeling of safety and fulfillment that this article wishes for. Just money.
> So, there is no compact that will create the feeling of safety and fulfillment that this article wishes for. Just money.
Money is the best freedom buyer. Don't trust anyone who says "Money doesn't buy happiness". That's rich-people propaganda to keep the rest of us dependent.
As Lucy Liu said in a fantastic interview: Do everything in your power to accumulate fuck you money as early as possible. Because then you can say No.
Even a few months of buffer is enough to buy lots of wellbeing. Having FIRE money is obviously even better.
Collective action is the best freedom-buyer. Stop trying to atomize society. We need to work together to fight for our rights, not try to hoard what meager crumbs we get from multi-billion dollar companies.
The issue is game-theoretic. There’s value in having money, absolutely, but most people end up having to chase it and never get any. If one person chases money, emancipation results for him. If everyone chases money, as most of us are forced to do, we end up miserable, and nobody wins except the people we should be removing from power as fast as possible.
Money clearly matters a lot, though. Why? Because we live in an objectively evil society—an oligarchy that has no language but money.
It's easy to write "just get more money" from a Palo Alto coffee shop making six figures and screwing off on HN all day in between "looks good" PR reviews. The rest of America is a little more angry than that.
> The issue is game-theoretic. There’s value in having money, absolutely, but most people end up having to chase it and never get any
We are on HN. The typical person here can achieve freedom for themselves and their family. And we should work to change the system also.
Remember that someone with 2mil can easily FIRE in America and still be closer to the destitute than the billionaires. 2mil is pretty achievable to most people on HN and we should definitely encourage each other to get there.
Vilifying small scale financial freedom is part of tall poppy syndrome and plays directly into the hands of wealthy oligarchs. The more people who think getting rich is bad, the better.
We gotta always remind each other that a millionaire is closer to us normies than they are to the billionaires.
This is an excellent post and I agree. That said, we should vilify people who get rich (small or large scale) in reprehensible ways, e.g. class traitors and people who enforce the system. But the distinction between people who simply succeed in a corrupt world (because life is random) and those who are rewarded for making it worse is important and underacknowledged.
I think I've found my peace. I'm 24, planning to live my entire life without long term relationships, so I don't have to worry about responsibilities to others. I live in Europe so theoretically retirement is not a death sentence, but if it gets too difficult I can always kill myself. One advantage of this life is that it becomes quite easy to save money when you don't have pointless expenses. So far I am very happy and stress free.
It is peaceful and I'm finding myself in a similar place at a slightly older age. Responsibility to others can indeed be draining. But I'd encourage you to see beyond ending yourself as an alternative. There's always another way to go forwards and grow.
Oh, certainly. I am not suicidal or depressed, but I simply do not see a point in living further if I had to work myself to exhaustion every day just to feed myself, or became severely ill. Having an escape button feels quite nice even if I'm not going to press it.
Author lives in NYC (a little city?) and seems to be rediscovering early '00s hipsterdom ("authenticity"), JOMO, and realizing her surrogate activities are just that. Her instagram is a sea of beige and rouge that represents what I hate about IG: an unattainably fashionable and curated portrayal. Oddly, this is what I loved about tiktok. On tiktok I watched a 60 year old man talk about his early mornings working at costco. I watched a middle aged woman prepare breakfast at a rural gas station. I can't imagine these types of real, ordinary, and representative lives on IG versus OP's yuppie elite ideal. For god's sake, does she ever sit down and eat a big mac? She is dripping in pretense not authenticity, especially with the tumblr-era lack of upper case.
Have some sympathy. She's been told she's a princess her whole life and is waiting for the rich prince to provide the IG worthy lifestyle of luxury and ease she deserves.
Eating a big mac and posting on Tiktok isn’t authenticity. It’s two bad health choices. Asserting someone is not serious or intelligent because they don’t post on your marketing driven social media app of choice is very pot-kettle behavior.
Agree but at the same time talking about leaving the rat race and glorifying the simple life is old hat for anyone over the age of 25. It gets annoying reading trite advice written by someone that sees it as profound insight.
I find these types of ideas to be more of a coping mechanism than any sort of deep insight on the human condition. Once everything is stripped away and you are spending your days making artisanal gooseberry preserves you may find that life is still not possessed of anything meaningful.
Yes. These types of hot takes only have force because most people don't pursue them. In a world where most people pursued a "little life", you'd see articles about the "quiet rebellion of ambition". Is either life better than the other? On what grounds? Is it not entirely dependent on the details of the life in question? Does no one understand the deep truth of the phrase "the grass is always greener"?
Mmmm the OP describes a very expensive mid-life retirement: an unspecified number of children, cats, a dog, a garden, living near enough a park that you might want to walk through, shopping at a farmer's market, books and art in your home, wine, and all in a "culturally rich" location!
I think most humans are pleasure seeking and would choose the above, if it were a choice! But the pinnacle for most people I know would be to enjoy one or two of the above, on the margins of a hard-working life.
It reminds me of some of the "I had a job in finance but it wasn't fulfilling so I went and did X" and X is where they take their massive nest egg and largely without much hassle just buy a nice retirement (farm or something and do wood working).
It's presented as some sorta contrast / revelation, but story is one that wasn't going to happen without the first part.
Reminds me of the start up that gets acquired and the former founder sitting on his pile of cash upset about what they do with his product. Bro you took gobs of money to let them do that thing ...
I'd be most interested in folks jiving those two lives and how they intersect rather than the almost strange born again type stories.
There is a better way, but you can’t drink any of the kool aid. I wish I could tell other people how to do what I have done, but I have come to understand that it only works for me because i tend not to think things are important that other people value, and I value things that other people sacrifice to obtain those unimportant things.
It’s worked very well for me. If I have a piece of advice I think people might be able to use, it would be to own a place. It should be cheap and have little or no property taxes. A bit of land. Maybe an acre or two. In the country but not too far off a road. It’s not an investment, it’s not your home, it’s a place. Build a house there. Build it yourself. A very modest house with your own hands.
Learn how. Build a home that you can walk away from and come back in ten years and not be bothered by the inevitable decay. The absolute minimum. This is not your home. This is your refuge. Put it in a legal situation so that it can’t be taken from you (obviously this also means you don’t really own it, and can never sell it) The worst that can ever happen is that you have to go and live there while you start from zero.
Now, you will never be without a place.
For most people, this will be enough to give them courage to take some necessary risks. That is enough.
If you want to take it farther (you probably don’t) this is what I have done, and I’m not at all alone in this experience:
Once you have a place, Become unemployable. Any job is a means to a very near end. If you have to work, take a job that pays well but you hate. invest your time and resources in anything where your efforts will be rewarded disproportionally to the risks. 10:1 bets on 1000:1 odds. There are so many things that people will simply ignore because the chance of failure is 90% if done well… but there are a lot of those losing propositions that will compensate way above their risk.
The hack is you can never go bust. Only your health can stop you. you have your place. You have to always be willing to put it all on the line. You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again. You get better, you get smarter, you get wiser. Eventually you win. Is it enough? If it’s not, set half aside in durable assets, and keep going.
Most people are so risk averse that you will have these opportunities basically to yourself.
99.99 percent will find a reason that this won’t work for them, and they’ll be right.
But sometimes you’ll run into someone else in a different stage of the same game. If they’re much farther along than you, they’ll recognise you and you might have a drink, and make a mentor. This is the most valuable relationship you will ever have. Your spouse can be replaced. Your mentor probably can’t .
Unfortunately what you described has been made illegal by incompetent "small town governments" by adopting Karen-esque zoning and building codes that would fine you to oblivion if you tried to build something affordable.
"Cheap", from what I'm currently seeing, starts at around $300,000 for a place like you describe. If you just buy raw land and try to build your own home, the county will either not let you, or it will end up more expensive than $300,000.
> You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again.
If it doesn't matter, you might as well not do it at all. Doing it again takes time in a game with a very limited amount of it. You can only do it again maybe 2-3 times in a lifetime. Maybe 4-5 if you have exceptionally lucky genetics.
Now $300k isn't that much, but it is going to be a barrier for a lot of average Americans.
I think you’ve got my timeline wrong. If you don’t have a foreseeable exit (which means only that you have built significant value) within 4 years, ffs it’s a fail. Most of my failures were foreseeable within months, not years. Fail fast. That doesn’t mean that you don’t do century projects, it just means the value has to be obvious within a reasonable amount of time or you put your stuff in boxes and go home. By that time you should have 2 or 3 other things you’re low-key working on anyway.
I’ve launched or participated in at least 50 projects and pivots in my lifetime so far, almost exclusively failures. In the last decade and a half, my results are much, much better. For me, the issue was usually inadequate moat +poor funding or being a decade ahead of the market.
As for the cost of housing etc, stop thinking about houses. Start thinking about buildings. For the sake of all that is holy never build in a residential zoned area unless
there is nonexistent enforcement or properly incentivisable inspectors. Housing is a racket of its own, with its own proper criminals and everything.
You can get a lot in New Mexico with nil property taxes and minimal controls for about a thousand dollars. G1 land in Alaska can be had for 4- 5 k and has no zoning controls at all.. It doesn’t need to be near a nice town. An hour to a reasonable town (100k population plus) is fine. Remember, it’s not your home. It’s a place.
I’m not talking about a place you want to live, I’m talking about a place you can live. As long as you can get water, some tumbleweed sandlot in the desert is fine, just cover it in cheap panels and buy the biggest AC unit you can. I prefer a woody place above 2000’MSL and not on any historical flood plain though. Also hurricanes and tornadoes are a big turn-off.
It doesn’t have to be in the USA either. In some ways even better if you have skills that allow remote work or platform work (oil rigs, mining, mercenary, contract
Pilot, work camps).
You can build a structure that is liveable for about 50 a square foot. Shoot for around 600 square feet, like a ww2 era home. Bare plywood floors, Sheetrock, etc. If in other countries, use whatever the poor people use to build with. That will also offer some cultural protection.
If you can’t do it, in today’s market, for under 75k you aren’t trying. Just start with a small piece of land.
Maybe Tow and Park an (old) motorhome on it until your house is built. Get the motorhome running and sell it for twice what you paid if it’s not a total lost cause. Don’t ask me about split-rim tires though. I had to pay in (goods) to get one changed at an extremely sketchy tire place. I mean, really sketchy. I’ve spent some time in the 42 in Santo Domingo, and I’m telling you, this place, in North Pole, Alaska, of all the godforsaken places, was sketchy as hell. Just don’t bother.
If you get to North Pole though, see if Dirty-Neck Pete is still alive (no, really) because he has a junkyard with some astounding shit in it including the some of the infamous overland train, Soviet era relics, and a lot of other stuff that will probably eventually become a superfund site. He’s probably dead by now though.
Not possible. It was about (64.8096, -147.5720) if you get some 1980s aerial survey photos you can probably see the overland train, some APCs , maybe some old long range SAMs, presumably without motors or warheads.
First place I built, and still my fall back of fallbacks is a 450 square foot cabin in Alaska. No running water. Built that when I was 16-21, started as 128 square feet grew over time. I didn’t know the gift I was giving myself at the time, I just wanted a place to smoke dope and shag. The time I spent pounding nails in those boards has paid dividends of many thousands per hour.
I grew up poor, subsistence fishing, hunting, gardening. Later I understood that was a choice of my father’s. He made good money when he worked, he just preferred to be at home and work with his kids. Reflecting on it, when he needed to buy a new truck, he went to work for a month, bought a 1977 dodge crew cab new off the lot, went back to hunting lol.
I Always had a natural aversion to employment (not to hard work, just working under supervision) , probably a personality disorder I guess. I value the control of my time to an extremely high degree. I’ve been self employed / founder / investor 90 percent or more of my working life.
Ended up raising my first kid at the cabin for a few years. Eventually, in my early 30s, I started to have something you might call a bit of success.
As for how it helped? I’ve never paid rent or a mortgage in my life.(except short term/vacation rentals, hotels, etc, of course) I launched and crashed several businesses from there. Never felt like the end of the world, just the end of the day.
I'm the CTO of a small startup. Recently I bought a small farm and moved there. I will continue working remotely while also enjoying being closer to nature, eating healthier, being able to have more animals and eventually start having children with my partner. I think this is the right balance for me, but time will tell.
Only part way through this, but I feel it in my bones. Currently going through a bout of reflux that feels like it may be my body saying, "make changes, this is too much stress."
Learning to climb down the ladder after a lifetime of striving up it is a really hard mindset shift.
Meh. To have a little life you have to compete for a good job so you have a good pay.
The author frames it as if you can just semi-retire and still have $200K a year which is observably and factually absolutely not true. Like the tired Hollywood trope of "I am done working hard, let's just go live at this beach-front property and work whenever we like and oh, by the way, money is not a problem ever and how the frak did we buy this beach-front property again?". Like the old Angelina Jolie movie: "Life or Something Like It" (2002).
Glad that the author has such a privileged life but most of us have arrived at this "wisdom" by 25 year old at the most and the depressing conclusion is that you have to keep grinding just to have this "little life". Because if you stop or even slow down, it's mostly homeless life that's awaiting you, not a little one.
Lol. This cynical attitude cracks me up so much. I lived in NYC for over 10 years. I never in my life made anywhere near $200k. I just retired this year at the ripe old age of 38. How? By following this apparently obvious "wisdom" of living simply, within my means, for ~15 years, and saving the excess. No trust funds, no Bitcoin-esque investment wins. Just saving money in boring index funds over 15 years, and living within my means.
In my most recent job, I earned $160k. During my ~15 year software development career, I worked for a total of 4 companies, none overlapping, none that required more than 40 hours per week. I saved ~60% of my take-home pay every year, and invested it in a 60/40 mix of VTSAX / VTIAX. I'm married, and my wife made $8,000 last year. I had to save enough to cover our collective expenses, otherwise this timeline would've been even faster!
I agree! Making > $100k is an absolute privilege. I am privileged as all hell finding myself interested in and decent enough at computer programming at a point in time where it was a relatively lucrative field to be in. That's serious luck!
But if you're making < $100k and suggesting you need $200k in passive income to go to a farmer's market, cook pasta for dinner, read library books, grow some plants, and drink the occasional wine? That doesn't inspire confidence that you have a great understanding of the value of a dollar.
I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that you came here to be snarky and tear down a straw man... one that doesn't exist.
I'm not going to bore you with my life story. But it has been an extremely bumpy ride and it's still not going well. Make what that info what you like. You'll probably say it's all my fault and I deserve it.
> The author frames it as if you can just semi-retire and still have $200K a year
I was just responding to that.
I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come. I recognize most people have much harder lives than I've had. I made some assumptions based just on your $200k comment above, and the fact that—let's face it—most HNers are making ridiculously large sums of money, and there is no end to these similar "this is impossible!" style comments on this page.
Truly, I'm sorry to hear you've had to deal with so much strife. Nobody deserves that. If you'd like to share more, my email is in my profile.
If you are giving me your permission then I will reach out. It's been getting increasingly shitty lately and I am on the brink. Maybe talking about it with a stranger will help.
I'm sorry for making assumptions about your position. Last thing I want is to pile on someone already going through a hard time. I hope your luck turns around.
Sounds like you did, in fact, enjoy significant investment gains just by being in the market for a long time. This is by no means guaranteed to be true in the future.
For sure, it's been a pretty above-average time to be in US market. Very much feels like a bubble ready to burst at any moment. But 40% of my investments are in non-US funds, which have gone sideways for the entire time I've invested. All the modest gains are just dividends there.
This strategy doesn't depend on amazing returns. If you save 65% of your income, and you currently have $0, you can retire in about 10.5 years (assuming fairly modest 5% return on investments). A 50% savings rate puts you at a 17 year career. It's the traditional "save 10%" retirement plan that really relies so heavily on the market going up long-term. The "live cheaply" strategy is infinitely more resilient.
For context, since 1900, the DOW Jones has returned, on average, 7.5% after inflation. And the S&P500 has returned ~6.5% adjusted for inflation. And in Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, he shows that throughout history, capital has generally returned around 5% (which, itself is kind of a problem).
But yes. The future is unknowable. There are countless things that could dramatically change these types of financial forecasts.
Everyone's circumstances are different. There are plenty of early retirees with similar backgrounds to my own that have kids (Mr. Money Mustache himself has a kid, for example, and retired at 30!) We currently have no kids. But I find the "kids are expensive!" thing is usually pretty overblown / not very creative about solving any problems. Kid spending is similar to the emotional and socialized high-spending expectations that plague the wedding industry. If one applies the same creative simple living strategies outlined in this article, there's no reason kids should increase one's expenses _that_ much. Saving up an extra $100k per kid is probably more than enough, and wouldn't delay an early retirement by more than ~6 months to a year in most cases.
"there’s a pervasive myth that has seeped into every corner of our current reality claiming that in order to have a meaningful life, we’re told that worth is measured in titles, achievements, and the scope of our influence. "
The formerly most pervasive myth in my culture required that in order to live a good life we should strive to treat others well.
Not many did it but it seems a good aspiration, to base my self-esteem on how I treat others rather than on how they view me.
the irony in all of this, is that if social media were completely eradicated from the world and everyone had a chance to look inward in order to pursue being the very best version of themselves possible, both emotionally and logistically in their career pursuits, imagine the repercussions of this and how it would positively impact our society… but alas, i’m dreaming of a world where that could never exist again.
could not have said it better myself… I quit all social media and I cannot even put in words how much my life has improved since then. not only in personal aspect of not being subjected of nonsense of social media but also my social life has improved immensely. my friends of course are all on social media and any discussion that relates to it that spills into our group chats I am like “no clue and don’t give two shits about it” - glorious existence!
Is hacker news not social media? Or do you find that it works as a form of social media that is “good” whereas all these other forms you’ve abandoned are “bad?”
If it’s a simple matter like that, what ideas could other social media take from HN to improve?
No personalized feed driven by anything other than user selections. User identities downplayed. Profiles, but barely. Can’t “follow” people.
If HN is social media, the term’s being used so broadly we’ll need something other term to refer to the kind of thing that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et c, are.
- not owned by US adversary (this is X, Facebook, TikTok (current and new one after the “sale”…) all are owned by people who do not care about Americans and work actively to destroy it)
- no personal shit like “look at my life, I won’t have money for milk but here is a picture from Hawaii
A trend? People never capitalized anything on IRC in the early 90s. The only time I saw it was on forums and other longer forms of text. And then eventually everyone else joined the Internet and more formal writing became the norm. Not wanting to pointlessly capitalize letters is neither here nor there. It doesn't mean anything.
That's fair enough but it is actually a style which some people choose for their blog. I'd also note that this post isn't on IRC; perhaps they're eschewing capitalization for some reason other than to communicate in a more natural cadence.
The rest of this persons feed is jam-packed with ludicrously pretentious photos of people posing in expensive clothing in ways clearly carefully chosen to appear spontaneous, uploaded to the internet for attention. The irony.
I'm usually averse to pointing out conflicts like you mention but there's certainly an sort of "internet culture" of playing the game of internet imagery and etc and ... decrying it / pining for something simpler / more fulfilling.
They know they can just go be simpler and give it a shot right?
People are full of conflicts so that alone isn't a surprise, but the scale of this seesaw on the internet feels weirdly large.
I sometimes think they mean that the people they see with all the "titles, achievements, influence" are not the people they like, and some simpler ideal is just the natural argument against them. Meanwhile ... they would rather be the folks with "titles, achievements, influence.".
What specific sentences or phrases in this article could you not understand? For that matter what kinda shit does your uncle get up to that would create this ambiguity?
Well, I thought this was pretty terrific, and I'm a little sad to see some of the comments.
I don't think it's a "very expensive mid-life retirement", to echo and paraphrase much of the criticism here. Yes, it could be, but it also doesn't need to be. Instead, it's about a mindset which says - I'm ok with going this far but don't feel the need to go a huge lot further.
We spent the weekend with friends. She is high up working for some US corp, doing maybe £250k a year. He's in something to do with governance that I don't fully understand, on maybe £150k+. They live in a stunning house, they have insanely busy jet-setting type lives, they have two small kids, two expensive cars, endless holidays abroad, several flats that they rent out, all the trimmings.
We had fun seeing them, and dipping into their life - but on the whole they seem to spend their lives being stressed, busy and not very contented.
My wife and I spent the journey home thanking our stars for our much simpler, much less glamorous, much (financially) poorer lives. We live by the sea, we have raised our (now late teen / early twenties) kids by choosing to be present, and this has come at the "expense" of our careers. We've run a small business working with non-profits for 15 years where we deliberately (in order to keep a sense of life balance) choose not to grow. My wife started a floristry business because she wanted something beautiful that was hers, but she has no ambitions to make it into something enormous and unwieldy.
We're in our late 40's / 50's - so I guess we partially fit the criticism, although we're far from retirement (lolz, not nearly enough cash to do that!), but on the other hand - we've always chosen to live like this. We had brief flirtations with big jobs in our mid-20's, and we had some hunger to climb a little bit up the salary pole early on, but we've both always been in and around non-profits and we've never had ambitions to be hugely wealthy or hugely successful, or hugely anything really. We just like ticking along, doing what we do, seeing some friends, writing a few songs and looking at bits of art along the way.
I do fully accept that there is a whole level of shitness in environments in which you have to hold down 3 jobs in order to make ends meet, and I also feel that the current environment is pretty scary for kids just entering the job market or at the beginning of their working lives. I'm under no illusions: I've been pretty lucky in my personal and working life. But I've also made this journey making quite a lot of conscious decisions that I think can be chosen (if you want to choose them!) along the way, not just when you're older or luckier or more comfortable.
You can sometimes choose (for example) to buy second hand, or to try not to take on debt, or to go for jobs that give you a better balance of time vs money. You can choose to do things cheaper. You can choose to be happier with less. You can choose experiences over objects.
Having no money is awful. But having a massive ton of it with all the complexity it brings - that can be awful, too.
For those that don't know, the lack of capitalization is a Gen Z affect. To the people who write like this, using capitalization is a type of formality that is reserved for serious topics and is almost like most of us would consider all caps, but more nuanced. Writing is inherently a form of self-expression, and so is ripe for artistic expression. The topic and the lack of capitalization actually make a lot of sense together given the author's cultural context.
Gen Z affect? This Substack post has all the staples of a Millenial tumblr blog post, not only the lack of uppercase but also the whimsical drawings of cherished children books to emphasise the “vibe”, and the whole thesis of the post is basically promoting the hipster “”“authenticity “”” (using hipster runoff inspired use of quotes on purpose here)
Man I do the quote thing and couldn't tell remember where I'd picked up that particular affect. HRO is a pretty good guess. Maybe Carles is in web heaven with MySpace Tom.
Oh please. The author describes "the little life" as an absurdly posh mid-life retirement which no actual person can afford if they don't come from immense inherited wealth: their "cultural context" is Manhattan trust fund brat. In that context, trying to look like bell hooks with the all-lowercase affect is ridiculous and bordering on offensive.
I’ve wrestled with this idea since reading My Side of The Mountain when I was quite young. Our society and culture constantly reinforces the perceived need to make enough money to retire one day, assuming that there is a necessary amount of money one needs to continue living and that one should stop working at some point. The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe and be able to live a long health life. My rampant consumption and desire to live a “full” life, like those that I see posted on social media, also stoke this financial insecurity mindset—“I must have more so that I can do more so that people will know that I am fulfilled and then I will feel happy and fulfilled.”
> The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe
It wasn't an accident. Near as I can tell there is a not-insignificant part of the American psychological context that amounts to a threat of utter destitution should you not choose to keep slaving away. By Krom, America needs homeless people to show you just how far you can fall unless you keep serving the man.
I'm coming to terms with the fact that if I want to leave any inheritance at all I will need to be voluntarily turning down medical care at some point in my life. I'm only 30 and I know for certain that lifespan is not the parameter I want to optimize. Rather, it is quality of life.
That's definitely true, and I think it's good you realize it so young.
It's inherent because of the diminishing returns for aggressive healthcare intervention. We're all going to die. We could ramp up the costs of intervention to arbitrary levels in a final death spasm, but we will still die. So, we have to strike some kind of balance.
The harder part, I think, is thinking about the decades leading up to that final end game. How do you trade off quality of life in different decades by saving and time-shifting some of your spending power into the future. It's not just medical costs but all the other aspects of life which carry a mix of predictable and unpredictable costs.
I hope to solve it through the healthy lifestyle: diet, exercises, sleep, outdoor time, stress management, so I will be healthy and active for a long time until some organ suddenly fails, so I won't spend money on medical care which observes my slowly fading body while giving some not necessary helpful treatment.
Turning down medical care at some point in your life maybe the right thing to do.
I bet if you were to ask most doctors, one of the most heartwrenching things they are required to do is keep people alive and in pain long past the point of compassion.
I am not advocating for euthanasia, but within the last 2 years I have observed such cruelty only once averted
> lifespan is not the parameter I want to optimize. Rather, it is quality of life.
Fortunately, the 2 are often correlated, the best ways to prepare for a long lifespan are the same as preparing for a long health span, and that includes a high quality of life.
True, and that's why I wish there was a greater focus on preventative care in the US. Takes a lot of motivation to get a physical when things are mostly fine.
I'm working on the habits I have most direct control over: healthy eating, cardio exercise and reducing stress.
Most people agree with you until the moment they actually have to decide between further treatment and likely death. Most people simply hold on until they have no choice but to die.
Is there some kind of reader-mode filtering site one can put a URL in to get a version that undoes this extra effort to remove capital letters? From what I’ve gotten of this piece I think it’s up my alley, but reading it is unpleasant.
[edit] incidentally, if this fad doesn’t burn out soon we’re going to need a setting to fix it under the heading of accessibility. I expect there are several categories of people for whom this is even more annoying than for most of us, and who can’t just get over it or re-train their brain to do better without the very-useful cues provided by capital letters, notably dyslexics.
This is actually one of the great uses of transformer models. Pick your favorite A.I. and you can ask it to capitalize the text.
i don’t get it, most letters you read will be lowercase, what’s a few more in the grand scheme?
Also, periods are just a small percentage of the characters. Maybe we should skip them.
And spaces! They don't even have any content, just the wasted space! Let's drop those too.
>'The Art of Asking Your Boss For A Raise' by French experimental author Georges Perec is best read aloud. It’s a theatrical piece with dazzling, recursive language that evokes laughter and pity at 'your' plight as you tackle the practical and emotional burden of asking for a much needed (if not deserved) pay increase while in the employ of one of France’s largest companies.
>The entirety of the book's 80 pages are one sentence, without punctuation, capitalization or spatial breaks.
https://www.michael-maiello.com/logical-loops-with-georges-p...
It speaks volumes that this is the first and probably last time I'll hear this.
I don't get it, most of the streets don't have traffic lights, what's a few less in the grand scheme? :)
I suspect much of the reaction is that it seems a little pretentious, like a faux optimization along the lines of "Oh I'm soooo busy, no time for caps", etc.
It’s pretty pretentious to say you find a passage of text unpleasant to read just because there aren’t capitalized letters in it.
I just don't read long form in this silly style. Skipped.
Couldn’t read it & didn’t want to make the extra effort required to. Every message, paragraph, article, blog post or company missive I’ve ever read that deliberately went the extra mile to remove capitalisation was written by the type of “change for the sake of change is always better” numpty who is not yet mature enough to have any insights worth sharing.
thanks for letting everyone know you didn’t read it, we were all wondering about that :)
You’re welcome. Thanks for responding to part of my comment :)
I always think these kinds of mentalities are based on people who have never been in dire straits or financially insecure. Living a simple life is almost impossible, pursuing wealth is probably the only way to be secure in a simple life. Even if you FIRE, you need to pretty aggressively pursue wealth at the beginning to make it work.
> Living a simple life is almost impossible, pursuing wealth is probably the only way to be secure in a simple life.
Maybe this seems true if you live in SF or NYC or are surrounded by people who are continuously preaching "high acheivement", but there indeed many people who lead a simple life. They don't have all the comforts that they could otherwise have if they pushed themselves to have more money, but they earn enough at their job for their own modest needs and contentment. It's the feeling that you always have to be reaching for the next rung in the ladder that creates anxiety.
I live in Canada, 2 hours from Toronto and a 1 bedroom apartment is CAD2300 per month. Working is not enough to afford that, you need to be somewhat affluent to afford rent and groceries. I think this idyllic idea of life is only possible outside of US/Canada/most of Europe.
It’s pretty easy to live a simple life if you don’t expect cutting edge healthcare, the best education for one’s kids’, and living in colder/flatter places.
If you expect a better than average quality of life, then you will have to compete for it. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to be bequeathed a sufficiently large portfolio.
If you want an average quality of life you need to compete for it because the average person competes.
Most people, myself included, struggle to understand what actually makes us happy, what our needs truly are, and how to balance the pressures of the world around us (real or perceived, necessary or irrelevant).
We leave a lot on the table in terms of doing less and getting more — meaning, contentment, joy, safety — from our lives.
Or you are born to a developing country and get a remote job as a software engineer. Not much competition (at least until 2022).
Sadly no longer true. :(
Maybe just for now? Imagine if China start hiring all the laid off engineers. The US companies would need to start hiring again, paying even more than the first round.
Cool but who is going to support me while this happens?
I mean I get you but it's not happening any family people in the meantime...
> Cool but who is going to support me while this happens?
I don't know. Is this some arrangement you have had in your life? Being supported by others wasn't never an option for me, I will not expect to be the case now that my chosen career doesn't look as great anymore. I live frugally (after losing everything creating a startup) and saved most of my salary in the past 5 years tho which now gives me some space to breath and plan for the next breakthrough. If things get better again, you should use the current terrible position you are in as a reference to also save most of your salary if you get a good job in tech.
Of course it was never an option, how can you even ask. We the men either provide or are thrown aside, as you are well-aware.
Mine was a bit of a snarky question admittedly. As said above (and I just noticed I made a typo or a grammar mistake, not sure which of both as I typed on the phone), I get your idea but nobody cares how are people supporting themselves during transitional periods. :(
Has not been my experience, everywhere I've been to there's grind going on at all social levels.
The exception being, as you noted, some wealthy people (not all, though).
Mm. If you want to save on expenses, just considering living in squalor or dying. Being homeless costs $0! How's that for a deal?
My reaction as well. Sure, one can have a fulfilling life without always chasing more, more more and it is might be worth thinking about cutting out some excessive consumerism, but this...
breakfast in bed on a sunday morning- sticky buns and black coffee, sharing a bed with my best friend. having more children. walking through the park while listening to the sounds of nature and kids laughing in the playground nearby. decompressing after a day at work on the couch with a cat who nestles besides my belly while i read, sip hot tea, and listen to tender jazz. cooking pasta for dinner, drinking wine, slow dancing in the kitchen with a lover. maybe starting a garden. farmers markets on weekends carrying a wicker basket full of apricots and hydrangeas. a soft, romantic, simple existence.
... this is the life of a wealthy retired person.
Most people who have a job where they aren't influencers, don't achieve anything, just go in for 8 hours a day and do ordinary work, are earning ordinary money, living in a small apartment, no pets allowed, have a marginally reliable car, can't afford to shop at the farmer's market, and with kids and homework and laundry and daily chores just want to get some sleep at the end of the day, spending three hours on cooking and enjoying a slow dinner with wine and music just isn't going to happen.
> Most people who have a job where they aren't influencers, don't achieve anything, just go in for 8 hours a day and do ordinary work, are earning ordinary money, living in a small apartment, no pets allowed, have a marginally reliable car, can't afford to shop at the farmer's market, and with kids and homework and laundry and daily chores just want to get some sleep at the end of the day, spending three hours on cooking and enjoying a slow dinner with wine and music just isn't going to happen.
In what world does making pasta take 3 hours? If you wanted to be fast, making pasta is literally a 10 min endeavor. “Slow” could mean spending an hour… or 30 mins. Nothing there is unreasonable.
There’s plenty to be gleaned from shirking the “keeping up with the Jones’s” mentality and being able to enjoy with less. Maybe that less isn’t true poverty, but even then there’s plenty of ways to foster contentment.
my wife made pasta yesterday, it took roughly 8.5 hours (unless you eat plain pasta with nothing or do not enjoy food it takes time to cook right…)
When people say “make pasta” they typically mean make a pasta dish. This could mean nothing more than cooking dried pasta and incorporating premade sauce. Even making your own sauce doesn’t need to take long for a super tasty sauce. I assume your wife is talking about making fresh pasta, which is not common nor what I would immediately assume someone means when they say “make pasta” for dinner.
what in that list requires someone to be wealthy?
This.
It reminds me of the average “indie hacker” mentality: just move to Bali and live off $2-3k.
The problem is that it just doesn’t work once you are past a certain age, and suddenly have “adult life”: parter, kids, aging parents.
I’d love to life a “little life”. Read books with my partner, drink coffee in the morning while watching the birds. The problem is that one small unlucky event, like being laid off, or someone you love getting sick, and it can all snowball into oblivion.
And the realistic thing to accept is that money solves a lot of problems. And in order to make enough of it, one should forgo the luxury if “little life” to some extent.
what prevents you from asking partner, kids, aging parents to live "little life" too?
> The problem is that one small unlucky event, like being laid off, or someone you love getting sick, and it can all snowball into oblivion.
that's why financial health would be to allocate 15% of your indie $2-3k to saving account to cover this unlucky event.
Because they are their own individuals, and they have their own life based on their own experiences. And while I can suggest, or even influence a little, their life choices -- I can't command them to change themselves 180 degrees.
Sometimes I feel like we, as society, became so detached from each other and from reality. Maybe it's because of social networks that keep pumping up the idea that everyone can be rich by investing $5 a day instead of buying Starbucks, or that the path to financial freedom is as simple as "just buy a house and rent it for $5k a month"; or that people suddenly started to call randoms in Twitter their friends. But I feel like people lost the ability to be empathetic towards others. They simply are unable to see and accept that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different set of rules that the ones they grew up under.
> Because they are their own individuals, and they have their own life based on their own experiences
it sounds like you need to make a choice to allow them to eat your life (spend your limited years of your life as race rat to satisfy their habits instead of "little life" if it is preference) or reject them.
> They simply are unable to see and accept that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different set of rules that the ones they grew up under.
sorry, I don't understand how this claim(which I also don't understand why you put it here) connected to $5 starbucks and renting a home. Maybe you could expand?
While I was trying to find a partner, at one point I realized that if I wanted to experience life in Asia or Africa, it would be a lot harder to do so if I got married before going there. Since I was still alone at the time I decided to postpone my search and move first.
Now I took my children to Africa precisely so they can see and understand that there are different people who were born, raised, and live under different conditions than the ones they themselves experienced so far.
Yes. Money is being able to support my family. Money is a safety net. Money is choices. I'd take a little life, but only if it comes with a Big paycheck.
with all due respect this cannot be further from the truth. americans are taught from young age that to make it in life they must increase their earnings. america needs modern day slaves working in cubicles 9-10 hours per day (even if you are at FAANG making high six figures you still a slave…).
but economics which america would not dream teach their young is that you can also cut expenses :) this is the quiet life part that you missed in the post… how much money do you think you need to make to have an insane level-of-comfort life in say Hope, Arkansas…?
I think this is a very entitled approach, I bet you need very little to live in a small rural area, but the crazy thing is that not everyone can do that since by definition if would get more expensive for everyone to do that. We can't all live off the grid away from people, modern infrastructure just cannot support that.
I think if the approach was, be happy with less, then sure we can get on board. There is a massive difference in being able to afford more and choosing less, than being forced to have less.
How many jobs are in Hope, Arkansas? And I mean real jobs, not building React garbage from a coffee shop. How many people are in Hope, Arkansas, especially people you could easily connect with? How much housing is in Hope, Arkansas? How many doctors? Are there specialists? How are the schools?
I'm so sick and tired of the techbro response to a rising cost of living and a lower quality of life is just "lol be poor :)". There's a reason half the country cheered when that CEO got shot. Maybe there just isn't enough Hope in Arkansas.
it is 2025 mate, you do not have to work in Hope to live in Hope… geeeeeez
as far as all the other questions, ask yourself the same for an urban area too :) and yes, there are great schools, great doctors, everything you need is there or a short ride away.
I am not surprised by your reply, expected to see many more, brainwashing is strooooong in the USA and these are very predictable responses
> even if you are at FAANG making high six figures you still a slave
I’m sorry, but do you know what a “slave” is?
I can’t imagine the kind of hopelessly ignorant perspective a person must have to say something like this.
when you have no control over your life, when you can get paged on your honeymoon or your kids birthday, when you need to ask permission to take time off… as society we are past what was slavery back in the day - now we got modern-day slavery, working for THE MAN
I don't remember ever asking permission to take time off.
I just put the days I'm going to be out on the calendar and inform my team/boss/manager after the fact.
And these weren't cushy FAANG jobs either. Just your typical run of the mill IT-adjacent roles.
> when you can get paged on your honeymoon or your kids birthday
Yes, you can be paged, but if you set your boundaries, you don't have to respond to the page. Again, I don't remember ever jumping up and treating something like that as an emergency. Always prioritized my own errands first.
I just put the days I'm going to be out on the calendar and inform my team/boss/manager after the fact.
why do you have to do that? who is this “boss” of yours that needs to know about what you do?
as long as you work for someone you are owned and exploited. if we had a nice chat meeting each other irl and we broached the subject of compesation and you said “I am L76 at Netflix making $965k” I am would be immensely happy for you but would think “this lovely mate is actually worth $1,500,000 and just doesn’t even know it”
>as long as you work for someone you are owned and exploited.
Truly, are you this deluded and bereft of perspective? Making such a claim about the vast majority of modern workers in the developed world is not only completely off the rails but also an insult to the real meaning of slavery and those who suffer it or have.
You've never exchanged money for someone elses labor in your life? Or had someone pay you to deliver your labor? Are you so privileged as to have never done either and thus live in a bubble that allows you to believe such nonsense as the above?
Feudal peasants weren't slaves. Employees aren't slaves. Serving someone makes you a serf in the worst case, not a slave.
If you were a FAANG slave, Google could literally prevent you from marrying, or ship you in a box to a different country without warning, or just kill you if you're no longer passing the bar.
Ok, no capital letters as a writing affectation is immediately upsetting... but I'll let my anxiety about that subside and focus on the content.
I get it, I really do. I find it a daily struggle. Last week I told my boss I couldn't travel this week. He was fine about it, there wasn't even a discussion. But I've worried about it ever since. Not because I want a raise or a promotion, but because I need this job and I worry that I won't get another good one if I lose it. I need it to cover my families needs, I need it so that I can live a good life post work. I need to think about post work because we all know that when your hair goes white and you struggle with the accessibility of the office you're not going to get another one.
So, there is no compact that will create the feeling of safety and fulfillment that this article wishes for. Just money.
> So, there is no compact that will create the feeling of safety and fulfillment that this article wishes for. Just money.
Money is the best freedom buyer. Don't trust anyone who says "Money doesn't buy happiness". That's rich-people propaganda to keep the rest of us dependent.
As Lucy Liu said in a fantastic interview: Do everything in your power to accumulate fuck you money as early as possible. Because then you can say No.
Even a few months of buffer is enough to buy lots of wellbeing. Having FIRE money is obviously even better.
Collective action is the best freedom-buyer. Stop trying to atomize society. We need to work together to fight for our rights, not try to hoard what meager crumbs we get from multi-billion dollar companies.
The issue is game-theoretic. There’s value in having money, absolutely, but most people end up having to chase it and never get any. If one person chases money, emancipation results for him. If everyone chases money, as most of us are forced to do, we end up miserable, and nobody wins except the people we should be removing from power as fast as possible.
Money clearly matters a lot, though. Why? Because we live in an objectively evil society—an oligarchy that has no language but money.
It's easy to write "just get more money" from a Palo Alto coffee shop making six figures and screwing off on HN all day in between "looks good" PR reviews. The rest of America is a little more angry than that.
> The issue is game-theoretic. There’s value in having money, absolutely, but most people end up having to chase it and never get any
We are on HN. The typical person here can achieve freedom for themselves and their family. And we should work to change the system also.
Remember that someone with 2mil can easily FIRE in America and still be closer to the destitute than the billionaires. 2mil is pretty achievable to most people on HN and we should definitely encourage each other to get there.
Vilifying small scale financial freedom is part of tall poppy syndrome and plays directly into the hands of wealthy oligarchs. The more people who think getting rich is bad, the better.
We gotta always remind each other that a millionaire is closer to us normies than they are to the billionaires.
This is an excellent post and I agree. That said, we should vilify people who get rich (small or large scale) in reprehensible ways, e.g. class traitors and people who enforce the system. But the distinction between people who simply succeed in a corrupt world (because life is random) and those who are rewarded for making it worse is important and underacknowledged.
I think I've found my peace. I'm 24, planning to live my entire life without long term relationships, so I don't have to worry about responsibilities to others. I live in Europe so theoretically retirement is not a death sentence, but if it gets too difficult I can always kill myself. One advantage of this life is that it becomes quite easy to save money when you don't have pointless expenses. So far I am very happy and stress free.
It is peaceful and I'm finding myself in a similar place at a slightly older age. Responsibility to others can indeed be draining. But I'd encourage you to see beyond ending yourself as an alternative. There's always another way to go forwards and grow.
Oh, certainly. I am not suicidal or depressed, but I simply do not see a point in living further if I had to work myself to exhaustion every day just to feed myself, or became severely ill. Having an escape button feels quite nice even if I'm not going to press it.
Seek professional help
Thank you for keeping me from even opening the article. No caps just sounds like someone whimpering in a corner.
Author lives in NYC (a little city?) and seems to be rediscovering early '00s hipsterdom ("authenticity"), JOMO, and realizing her surrogate activities are just that. Her instagram is a sea of beige and rouge that represents what I hate about IG: an unattainably fashionable and curated portrayal. Oddly, this is what I loved about tiktok. On tiktok I watched a 60 year old man talk about his early mornings working at costco. I watched a middle aged woman prepare breakfast at a rural gas station. I can't imagine these types of real, ordinary, and representative lives on IG versus OP's yuppie elite ideal. For god's sake, does she ever sit down and eat a big mac? She is dripping in pretense not authenticity, especially with the tumblr-era lack of upper case.
Have some sympathy. She's been told she's a princess her whole life and is waiting for the rich prince to provide the IG worthy lifestyle of luxury and ease she deserves.
Eating a big mac and posting on Tiktok isn’t authenticity. It’s two bad health choices. Asserting someone is not serious or intelligent because they don’t post on your marketing driven social media app of choice is very pot-kettle behavior.
Agree but at the same time talking about leaving the rat race and glorifying the simple life is old hat for anyone over the age of 25. It gets annoying reading trite advice written by someone that sees it as profound insight.
Don’t read it then. People are allowed to write advice you deem trite.
'A Little Life'
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Life-Hanya-Yanagihara/dp/08041...
Hands down the most depressing book I’ve ever read.
I find these types of ideas to be more of a coping mechanism than any sort of deep insight on the human condition. Once everything is stripped away and you are spending your days making artisanal gooseberry preserves you may find that life is still not possessed of anything meaningful.
Yes. These types of hot takes only have force because most people don't pursue them. In a world where most people pursued a "little life", you'd see articles about the "quiet rebellion of ambition". Is either life better than the other? On what grounds? Is it not entirely dependent on the details of the life in question? Does no one understand the deep truth of the phrase "the grass is always greener"?
Mmmm the OP describes a very expensive mid-life retirement: an unspecified number of children, cats, a dog, a garden, living near enough a park that you might want to walk through, shopping at a farmer's market, books and art in your home, wine, and all in a "culturally rich" location!
I think most humans are pleasure seeking and would choose the above, if it were a choice! But the pinnacle for most people I know would be to enjoy one or two of the above, on the margins of a hard-working life.
It reminds me of some of the "I had a job in finance but it wasn't fulfilling so I went and did X" and X is where they take their massive nest egg and largely without much hassle just buy a nice retirement (farm or something and do wood working).
It's presented as some sorta contrast / revelation, but story is one that wasn't going to happen without the first part.
Reminds me of the start up that gets acquired and the former founder sitting on his pile of cash upset about what they do with his product. Bro you took gobs of money to let them do that thing ...
I'd be most interested in folks jiving those two lives and how they intersect rather than the almost strange born again type stories.
That’s grim.
There is a better way, but you can’t drink any of the kool aid. I wish I could tell other people how to do what I have done, but I have come to understand that it only works for me because i tend not to think things are important that other people value, and I value things that other people sacrifice to obtain those unimportant things.
It’s worked very well for me. If I have a piece of advice I think people might be able to use, it would be to own a place. It should be cheap and have little or no property taxes. A bit of land. Maybe an acre or two. In the country but not too far off a road. It’s not an investment, it’s not your home, it’s a place. Build a house there. Build it yourself. A very modest house with your own hands.
Learn how. Build a home that you can walk away from and come back in ten years and not be bothered by the inevitable decay. The absolute minimum. This is not your home. This is your refuge. Put it in a legal situation so that it can’t be taken from you (obviously this also means you don’t really own it, and can never sell it) The worst that can ever happen is that you have to go and live there while you start from zero.
Now, you will never be without a place.
For most people, this will be enough to give them courage to take some necessary risks. That is enough.
If you want to take it farther (you probably don’t) this is what I have done, and I’m not at all alone in this experience:
Once you have a place, Become unemployable. Any job is a means to a very near end. If you have to work, take a job that pays well but you hate. invest your time and resources in anything where your efforts will be rewarded disproportionally to the risks. 10:1 bets on 1000:1 odds. There are so many things that people will simply ignore because the chance of failure is 90% if done well… but there are a lot of those losing propositions that will compensate way above their risk.
The hack is you can never go bust. Only your health can stop you. you have your place. You have to always be willing to put it all on the line. You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again. You get better, you get smarter, you get wiser. Eventually you win. Is it enough? If it’s not, set half aside in durable assets, and keep going.
Most people are so risk averse that you will have these opportunities basically to yourself.
99.99 percent will find a reason that this won’t work for them, and they’ll be right.
But sometimes you’ll run into someone else in a different stage of the same game. If they’re much farther along than you, they’ll recognise you and you might have a drink, and make a mentor. This is the most valuable relationship you will ever have. Your spouse can be replaced. Your mentor probably can’t .
That’s it. Bring on the hate.
Unfortunately what you described has been made illegal by incompetent "small town governments" by adopting Karen-esque zoning and building codes that would fine you to oblivion if you tried to build something affordable.
"Cheap", from what I'm currently seeing, starts at around $300,000 for a place like you describe. If you just buy raw land and try to build your own home, the county will either not let you, or it will end up more expensive than $300,000.
> You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again.
If it doesn't matter, you might as well not do it at all. Doing it again takes time in a game with a very limited amount of it. You can only do it again maybe 2-3 times in a lifetime. Maybe 4-5 if you have exceptionally lucky genetics.
Now $300k isn't that much, but it is going to be a barrier for a lot of average Americans.
I think you’ve got my timeline wrong. If you don’t have a foreseeable exit (which means only that you have built significant value) within 4 years, ffs it’s a fail. Most of my failures were foreseeable within months, not years. Fail fast. That doesn’t mean that you don’t do century projects, it just means the value has to be obvious within a reasonable amount of time or you put your stuff in boxes and go home. By that time you should have 2 or 3 other things you’re low-key working on anyway.
I’ve launched or participated in at least 50 projects and pivots in my lifetime so far, almost exclusively failures. In the last decade and a half, my results are much, much better. For me, the issue was usually inadequate moat +poor funding or being a decade ahead of the market.
As for the cost of housing etc, stop thinking about houses. Start thinking about buildings. For the sake of all that is holy never build in a residential zoned area unless there is nonexistent enforcement or properly incentivisable inspectors. Housing is a racket of its own, with its own proper criminals and everything.
You can get a lot in New Mexico with nil property taxes and minimal controls for about a thousand dollars. G1 land in Alaska can be had for 4- 5 k and has no zoning controls at all.. It doesn’t need to be near a nice town. An hour to a reasonable town (100k population plus) is fine. Remember, it’s not your home. It’s a place.
I’m not talking about a place you want to live, I’m talking about a place you can live. As long as you can get water, some tumbleweed sandlot in the desert is fine, just cover it in cheap panels and buy the biggest AC unit you can. I prefer a woody place above 2000’MSL and not on any historical flood plain though. Also hurricanes and tornadoes are a big turn-off.
It doesn’t have to be in the USA either. In some ways even better if you have skills that allow remote work or platform work (oil rigs, mining, mercenary, contract Pilot, work camps).
You can build a structure that is liveable for about 50 a square foot. Shoot for around 600 square feet, like a ww2 era home. Bare plywood floors, Sheetrock, etc. If in other countries, use whatever the poor people use to build with. That will also offer some cultural protection.
If you can’t do it, in today’s market, for under 75k you aren’t trying. Just start with a small piece of land.
Maybe Tow and Park an (old) motorhome on it until your house is built. Get the motorhome running and sell it for twice what you paid if it’s not a total lost cause. Don’t ask me about split-rim tires though. I had to pay in (goods) to get one changed at an extremely sketchy tire place. I mean, really sketchy. I’ve spent some time in the 42 in Santo Domingo, and I’m telling you, this place, in North Pole, Alaska, of all the godforsaken places, was sketchy as hell. Just don’t bother.
If you get to North Pole though, see if Dirty-Neck Pete is still alive (no, really) because he has a junkyard with some astounding shit in it including the some of the infamous overland train, Soviet era relics, and a lot of other stuff that will probably eventually become a superfund site. He’s probably dead by now though.
Not possible. It was about (64.8096, -147.5720) if you get some 1980s aerial survey photos you can probably see the overland train, some APCs , maybe some old long range SAMs, presumably without motors or warheads.
I'd be interested to hear your story - what was this place you built? How did it help you over the years?
First place I built, and still my fall back of fallbacks is a 450 square foot cabin in Alaska. No running water. Built that when I was 16-21, started as 128 square feet grew over time. I didn’t know the gift I was giving myself at the time, I just wanted a place to smoke dope and shag. The time I spent pounding nails in those boards has paid dividends of many thousands per hour.
I grew up poor, subsistence fishing, hunting, gardening. Later I understood that was a choice of my father’s. He made good money when he worked, he just preferred to be at home and work with his kids. Reflecting on it, when he needed to buy a new truck, he went to work for a month, bought a 1977 dodge crew cab new off the lot, went back to hunting lol.
I Always had a natural aversion to employment (not to hard work, just working under supervision) , probably a personality disorder I guess. I value the control of my time to an extremely high degree. I’ve been self employed / founder / investor 90 percent or more of my working life.
Ended up raising my first kid at the cabin for a few years. Eventually, in my early 30s, I started to have something you might call a bit of success.
As for how it helped? I’ve never paid rent or a mortgage in my life.(except short term/vacation rentals, hotels, etc, of course) I launched and crashed several businesses from there. Never felt like the end of the world, just the end of the day.
I'm the CTO of a small startup. Recently I bought a small farm and moved there. I will continue working remotely while also enjoying being closer to nature, eating healthier, being able to have more animals and eventually start having children with my partner. I think this is the right balance for me, but time will tell.
In the meantime I'll enjoy the ride!
Only part way through this, but I feel it in my bones. Currently going through a bout of reflux that feels like it may be my body saying, "make changes, this is too much stress."
Learning to climb down the ladder after a lifetime of striving up it is a really hard mindset shift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_of_Lisieux also bears reading. Her "Little Way" is well worth chewing on.
Meh. To have a little life you have to compete for a good job so you have a good pay.
The author frames it as if you can just semi-retire and still have $200K a year which is observably and factually absolutely not true. Like the tired Hollywood trope of "I am done working hard, let's just go live at this beach-front property and work whenever we like and oh, by the way, money is not a problem ever and how the frak did we buy this beach-front property again?". Like the old Angelina Jolie movie: "Life or Something Like It" (2002).
Glad that the author has such a privileged life but most of us have arrived at this "wisdom" by 25 year old at the most and the depressing conclusion is that you have to keep grinding just to have this "little life". Because if you stop or even slow down, it's mostly homeless life that's awaiting you, not a little one.
Lol. This cynical attitude cracks me up so much. I lived in NYC for over 10 years. I never in my life made anywhere near $200k. I just retired this year at the ripe old age of 38. How? By following this apparently obvious "wisdom" of living simply, within my means, for ~15 years, and saving the excess. No trust funds, no Bitcoin-esque investment wins. Just saving money in boring index funds over 15 years, and living within my means.
How much did you make per year? How many jobs did you have? How many jobs did you hop?
In my most recent job, I earned $160k. During my ~15 year software development career, I worked for a total of 4 companies, none overlapping, none that required more than 40 hours per week. I saved ~60% of my take-home pay every year, and invested it in a 60/40 mix of VTSAX / VTIAX. I'm married, and my wife made $8,000 last year. I had to save enough to cover our collective expenses, otherwise this timeline would've been even faster!
If you're unfamiliar, this is an excellent introduction to this concept: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
It's extremely simple. It's boring. It's slow (but much faster than the alternative!). And it works.
I never made even $100k a year. Locality matters a lot.
Privileged people being blind to their privilege. Nothing new. My original point still stands then.
Keep finding stuff hilarious I guess, though.
I agree! Making > $100k is an absolute privilege. I am privileged as all hell finding myself interested in and decent enough at computer programming at a point in time where it was a relatively lucrative field to be in. That's serious luck!
But if you're making < $100k and suggesting you need $200k in passive income to go to a farmer's market, cook pasta for dinner, read library books, grow some plants, and drink the occasional wine? That doesn't inspire confidence that you have a great understanding of the value of a dollar.
Good thing I don't do any of those things.
I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that you came here to be snarky and tear down a straw man... one that doesn't exist.
I'm not going to bore you with my life story. But it has been an extremely bumpy ride and it's still not going well. Make what that info what you like. You'll probably say it's all my fault and I deserve it.
You said:
> The author frames it as if you can just semi-retire and still have $200K a year
I was just responding to that.
I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come. I recognize most people have much harder lives than I've had. I made some assumptions based just on your $200k comment above, and the fact that—let's face it—most HNers are making ridiculously large sums of money, and there is no end to these similar "this is impossible!" style comments on this page.
Truly, I'm sorry to hear you've had to deal with so much strife. Nobody deserves that. If you'd like to share more, my email is in my profile.
If you are giving me your permission then I will reach out. It's been getting increasingly shitty lately and I am on the brink. Maybe talking about it with a stranger will help.
Yea, absolutely. Please do.
I'm sorry for making assumptions about your position. Last thing I want is to pile on someone already going through a hard time. I hope your luck turns around.
Sounds like you did, in fact, enjoy significant investment gains just by being in the market for a long time. This is by no means guaranteed to be true in the future.
For sure, it's been a pretty above-average time to be in US market. Very much feels like a bubble ready to burst at any moment. But 40% of my investments are in non-US funds, which have gone sideways for the entire time I've invested. All the modest gains are just dividends there.
This strategy doesn't depend on amazing returns. If you save 65% of your income, and you currently have $0, you can retire in about 10.5 years (assuming fairly modest 5% return on investments). A 50% savings rate puts you at a 17 year career. It's the traditional "save 10%" retirement plan that really relies so heavily on the market going up long-term. The "live cheaply" strategy is infinitely more resilient.
For context, since 1900, the DOW Jones has returned, on average, 7.5% after inflation. And the S&P500 has returned ~6.5% adjusted for inflation. And in Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, he shows that throughout history, capital has generally returned around 5% (which, itself is kind of a problem).
But yes. The future is unknowable. There are countless things that could dramatically change these types of financial forecasts.
> I never in my life made anywhere near $200k
> In my most recent job, I earned $160k.
Yeah, ok dude. At least you were honest, I guess.
No kids right?
Everyone's circumstances are different. There are plenty of early retirees with similar backgrounds to my own that have kids (Mr. Money Mustache himself has a kid, for example, and retired at 30!) We currently have no kids. But I find the "kids are expensive!" thing is usually pretty overblown / not very creative about solving any problems. Kid spending is similar to the emotional and socialized high-spending expectations that plague the wedding industry. If one applies the same creative simple living strategies outlined in this article, there's no reason kids should increase one's expenses _that_ much. Saving up an extra $100k per kid is probably more than enough, and wouldn't delay an early retirement by more than ~6 months to a year in most cases.
"there’s a pervasive myth that has seeped into every corner of our current reality claiming that in order to have a meaningful life, we’re told that worth is measured in titles, achievements, and the scope of our influence. "
The formerly most pervasive myth in my culture required that in order to live a good life we should strive to treat others well.
Not many did it but it seems a good aspiration, to base my self-esteem on how I treat others rather than on how they view me.
the irony in all of this, is that if social media were completely eradicated from the world and everyone had a chance to look inward in order to pursue being the very best version of themselves possible, both emotionally and logistically in their career pursuits, imagine the repercussions of this and how it would positively impact our society… but alas, i’m dreaming of a world where that could never exist again.
could not have said it better myself… I quit all social media and I cannot even put in words how much my life has improved since then. not only in personal aspect of not being subjected of nonsense of social media but also my social life has improved immensely. my friends of course are all on social media and any discussion that relates to it that spills into our group chats I am like “no clue and don’t give two shits about it” - glorious existence!
Is hacker news not social media? Or do you find that it works as a form of social media that is “good” whereas all these other forms you’ve abandoned are “bad?”
If it’s a simple matter like that, what ideas could other social media take from HN to improve?
No personalized feed driven by anything other than user selections. User identities downplayed. Profiles, but barely. Can’t “follow” people.
If HN is social media, the term’s being used so broadly we’ll need something other term to refer to the kind of thing that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et c, are.
to add
- no pictures
- no videos
- no adds
- no “for you” feeds
- not owned by US adversary (this is X, Facebook, TikTok (current and new one after the “sale”…) all are owned by people who do not care about Americans and work actively to destroy it)
- no personal shit like “look at my life, I won’t have money for milk but here is a picture from Hawaii
- insane shit gets easily flagged
- no influencers
- …
Are you the author on an alt? This article and comment are the first time I've ever seen someone on this website not use capitalization.
1) lots of people write like that; it's become a bit of a trend
2) the author did not capitalize "I" when referring to themselves like OP did
A trend? People never capitalized anything on IRC in the early 90s. The only time I saw it was on forums and other longer forms of text. And then eventually everyone else joined the Internet and more formal writing became the norm. Not wanting to pointlessly capitalize letters is neither here nor there. It doesn't mean anything.
That's fair enough but it is actually a style which some people choose for their blog. I'd also note that this post isn't on IRC; perhaps they're eschewing capitalization for some reason other than to communicate in a more natural cadence.
It was also pretty common in my cohort of Gen X who got on the internet back in the early 90s.
We might blame ee cummings, but it's a bit like blaming William Gibson for every cyberpunk affectation that appears today...
I wish I was that eloquent :)
Along the same topic: Obituary for a quiet life (2023) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028643
The rest of this persons feed is jam-packed with ludicrously pretentious photos of people posing in expensive clothing in ways clearly carefully chosen to appear spontaneous, uploaded to the internet for attention. The irony.
I'm probably drifting from the blog post here:
I'm usually averse to pointing out conflicts like you mention but there's certainly an sort of "internet culture" of playing the game of internet imagery and etc and ... decrying it / pining for something simpler / more fulfilling.
They know they can just go be simpler and give it a shot right?
People are full of conflicts so that alone isn't a surprise, but the scale of this seesaw on the internet feels weirdly large.
I sometimes think they mean that the people they see with all the "titles, achievements, influence" are not the people they like, and some simpler ideal is just the natural argument against them. Meanwhile ... they would rather be the folks with "titles, achievements, influence.".
Capitalization is the difference between "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse" and "i had to help my uncle jack off a horse".
Use it. Shit is unreadable.
What specific sentences or phrases in this article could you not understand? For that matter what kinda shit does your uncle get up to that would create this ambiguity?
It's not about understanding, it's about readability.
Yikes
Well, I thought this was pretty terrific, and I'm a little sad to see some of the comments.
I don't think it's a "very expensive mid-life retirement", to echo and paraphrase much of the criticism here. Yes, it could be, but it also doesn't need to be. Instead, it's about a mindset which says - I'm ok with going this far but don't feel the need to go a huge lot further.
We spent the weekend with friends. She is high up working for some US corp, doing maybe £250k a year. He's in something to do with governance that I don't fully understand, on maybe £150k+. They live in a stunning house, they have insanely busy jet-setting type lives, they have two small kids, two expensive cars, endless holidays abroad, several flats that they rent out, all the trimmings.
We had fun seeing them, and dipping into their life - but on the whole they seem to spend their lives being stressed, busy and not very contented.
My wife and I spent the journey home thanking our stars for our much simpler, much less glamorous, much (financially) poorer lives. We live by the sea, we have raised our (now late teen / early twenties) kids by choosing to be present, and this has come at the "expense" of our careers. We've run a small business working with non-profits for 15 years where we deliberately (in order to keep a sense of life balance) choose not to grow. My wife started a floristry business because she wanted something beautiful that was hers, but she has no ambitions to make it into something enormous and unwieldy.
We're in our late 40's / 50's - so I guess we partially fit the criticism, although we're far from retirement (lolz, not nearly enough cash to do that!), but on the other hand - we've always chosen to live like this. We had brief flirtations with big jobs in our mid-20's, and we had some hunger to climb a little bit up the salary pole early on, but we've both always been in and around non-profits and we've never had ambitions to be hugely wealthy or hugely successful, or hugely anything really. We just like ticking along, doing what we do, seeing some friends, writing a few songs and looking at bits of art along the way.
I do fully accept that there is a whole level of shitness in environments in which you have to hold down 3 jobs in order to make ends meet, and I also feel that the current environment is pretty scary for kids just entering the job market or at the beginning of their working lives. I'm under no illusions: I've been pretty lucky in my personal and working life. But I've also made this journey making quite a lot of conscious decisions that I think can be chosen (if you want to choose them!) along the way, not just when you're older or luckier or more comfortable.
You can sometimes choose (for example) to buy second hand, or to try not to take on debt, or to go for jobs that give you a better balance of time vs money. You can choose to do things cheaper. You can choose to be happier with less. You can choose experiences over objects.
Having no money is awful. But having a massive ton of it with all the complexity it brings - that can be awful, too.
For those that don't know, the lack of capitalization is a Gen Z affect. To the people who write like this, using capitalization is a type of formality that is reserved for serious topics and is almost like most of us would consider all caps, but more nuanced. Writing is inherently a form of self-expression, and so is ripe for artistic expression. The topic and the lack of capitalization actually make a lot of sense together given the author's cultural context.
Gen Z affect? This Substack post has all the staples of a Millenial tumblr blog post, not only the lack of uppercase but also the whimsical drawings of cherished children books to emphasise the “vibe”, and the whole thesis of the post is basically promoting the hipster “”“authenticity “”” (using hipster runoff inspired use of quotes on purpose here)
Man I do the quote thing and couldn't tell remember where I'd picked up that particular affect. HRO is a pretty good guess. Maybe Carles is in web heaven with MySpace Tom.
All I can say is the John Williams's Stoner would have handed back the essay covered in red ink. For that matter, so would have John Williams himself.
Oh please. The author describes "the little life" as an absurdly posh mid-life retirement which no actual person can afford if they don't come from immense inherited wealth: their "cultural context" is Manhattan trust fund brat. In that context, trying to look like bell hooks with the all-lowercase affect is ridiculous and bordering on offensive.