Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You need to save a few million dollars to retire with $40-$80k in investment income. It should be very possible to do this with a backend developer's salary over a period of 10-15 years, How would a few million be possible? What is your contextual salary for this position, and their expected expenses?
Earn 250k on average across 15 years. This is quite conservative for FAANG. In California, you'll take home about 150k. Each year, live frugally off 50k and put away 100k in index funds. Over 15 years, you'll gain 7% real annual returns from the stock market. In 15 years you'll go from $0 to $2.5m. At a very conservative safe withdrawal rate of 3.5%, you can withdraw about 85k per year for the rest of your life. If y…
Why I hate the weekends (2017)
161–170 of 353 posts
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#162This has already been solved thousands of years ago and it’s called Shabbat, one day of the week of true, strict rest. No doing the laundry, no cooking, no driving the car. In general, no creative activities which modify the world in some way.
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#163I can relate to the feelings in this article. But, for what it’s worth I’ve found that cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, and sleep, and exercise, really help.
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You need to save a few million dollars to retire with $40-$80k in investment income. It should be very possible to do this with a backend developer's salary over a period of 10-15 years, How would a few million be possible? What is your contextual salary for this position, and their expected expenses?
3.000.000 / 15 * 2 (50% savings rate) = $400k That’s a bit on the high end, but I guess not SV/FAANG impossible.
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been working remotely my whole life (freelance developer). It's interesting how jaded I am of driving in general. There are certain intersections in my town where it's common to get stuck at a red light that lasts for minutes. Things like this put me on complete life tilt. All I think about is "how can anyone put up with this every day?". I'm no longer surprised why people go berserk out of no where. I really do…
Yes - once you have full control of your time things like traffic and lineups drive you bonkers. Honestly, one would think that 'less stress' and a more peaceable mindset give one more resilience in dealing with such things, but just the opposite. To deal with traffic you almost have to 'give up' on the notion of doing something quickly and resign to the reality of it, which is what happens if you have to deal with i…
That's one thing that stuck with me when I attended a class with a Buddhist teacher. He said meditation shouldn't make you more stress resilient but more aware of the damage stress causes so you avoid it.
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you have it better than almost anyone who has ever existed in the history of the planet, but there's no need for an ounce of gratitude for that as long as someone else might be even better off.
Theres a reason that accountants of old are characterised as sullen and miserable people, and its not because they were poor. Happiness for the most part is resiliant to physical hardship - happiness indexes among countries are almost completely unrelated to GDP. Working this kind of mental & menial work clearly is missing something important that I'm confident we will one day understand a lot better. Perhaps its sim…
It's amazingly adept at this, to the point where usually you don't notice that you didn't actually decide to do that thing. The only time you might notice is in the case of strong addictions, where people try to go cold turkey and describe literally watching themselves in horror as they go back to the think they are actively trying to avoid.
What this leads do is an idea that successful people have which is that less well off people could sort themselves out by doing a particular thing, say, managing their money better. Or maybe its just the people who know many languages and look down on those who know few. Or maybe yourself, trying to stick to a diet plan and not being able to understand how you yourself can want one thing but do another.
Turns out, we are pretty much a function of our environment. We have a concept of something called "willpower" which is something where we can carry on despite our body needing respite, but only a little bit. This I think happens when we are using our conscious mind to complete tasks instead of our autopilot mode. This works, but is quickly draining and really doesn't last that long.
I think this kind of thing is where some of the stigma around mental health comes from. We have this idea that people are at all times acting according to what they simply want to be doing, whereas they are usually acting on autopilot , which is sometimes sort of close to what we want to be doing, but has a tendency in modern times to get stuck in loops of stuff like eat>sleep>work that make us feel worse which causes us to have less energy which causes us to just want more sleeping and eating rather than fixing the problem by breaking out of the cycle.
If we as a society aknowledged better how 99% of our actions are essentially done unconsciously, and then later sort of added together by our self aware part of the brain, I think people would be much more understanding of mental health issues - if someone behaves in a way counter to their own interests, its not because they are stupid, they are literally just unfortunate vitims of a sort of cyclical pattern of their bodies in their local environment.
We are kind of along for the ride in our own bodies a lot more than we might like to think, with only a small ability to push buttons to nudge ourselves in the directions we want
So you literally can't decide to just stop being in the kind of glitches in the autopilot that cause something as big as depression or as small as getting up early when you're tired. You only have a small amount of influence, and you have to spend it in ways that end up multiplying themselves by your autopilot thingy like deciding to give yourself good sleep, or food if you focus your willpower on those kinds of things, you end up with more willpower but sometimes even things as small as this require a lot more energy than you might be able to muster all at once, so you have to do even smaller things to build that up for example in the modern day deciding to interrupt yourself in the middle of a task is incredibly hard you could be working and know that you should be in bed but you just keep going because it takes more mental energy to interrupt yourself than you have and so you end up tired, and have that same low amount of energy the next day
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theres a reason that accountants of old are characterised as sullen and miserable people, and its not because they were poor. Happiness for the most part is resiliant to physical hardship - happiness indexes among countries are almost completely unrelated to GDP. Working this kind of mental & menial work clearly is missing something important that I'm confident we will one day understand a lot better. Perhaps its sim…
Theres this fundamental idea we have as a society that people are fundamentally able to do as they please at all times, which is pretty much just a lie. Almost the entire time we are awake, our body is doing things without us consciously deciding to do them. Only afterwards our brain spends time rationalising itself and constructing a sort of post-hoc rationalisation. It's amazingly adept at this, to the point where…
I guess the rambling and wandering nature of my thoughts are visible in the writing itself given I was writing without thinking (ironically)
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#168I find the typical work in developer jobs very fatiguing. It involves reading through loads of old code that other people have written over the years, trying to figure out how it all hangs together and where I inject my change in. For some reason that does my head in. Greenfield work is a lot less tiring, but much more rare in my experience. It's also a career path of it's own and hard to get on. I.e. you need greenf…
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest reason is because bosses don’t want us to. They want to make as much money as possible, and that’s about it really. The good news is we have made progress, through mass action, people have won the right to weekends, fewer hours and other rights. The final battle is one to win control of the workplace itself, a self-managed and owned workplace.
In tech in SV, so many stupid things happen because people work too much. Self-organizing is a challenge as well though.
Re: Why I hate the weekends (2017)
#170This resonates with me. I love my work, I really like what I do, I think it's mentally challenging, interesting, and important for our world and civilization and I believe I'm compensated well enough. But it's tiring ok? And all I can ever do on weekends is lying on my bed watching netflix. I work 9 to 6 and work out intensely for 2 hours every week day. By the time it's saturday I'm both physically and mentally exha…
Something like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDWyqnGhmWY
Maybe you want to ask yourself what you are working out for. If working out is actively eating into the reason that you are working out for, then I hope you can see the damage or at least the redundancy caused by extra workouts.
Also, you could take a look at some workout-esque hobbies. Bouldering has become very popular recently. Maybe try playing a sport that is high intensity (like squash or swimming)