201–210 of 289 posts
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I had a friend once refer to it as “funemployed”. I loved the term, though I still prefer to refer to intentional and willful breaks from employment as sabbaticals.
Sabbatical implies you are working on something else though, so seems to me quite different than "funemployed".
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>People considered me to be quasi-unemployed, despite working 80 hours a week. This hits hard. Whenever I think I want to do something, I try to seriously think about whether it’s something I want to do , or something I want to have done . Working on side projects and companies is something I enjoy actually doing, while for a lot of the status-seeking types it’s usually something they want to have done and finished s…
Interesting. I do all side projects because I want to have done them. I don't really enjoy doing them, but they bring benefit to someone, and that might be worth my time. I'm thinking of writing a book for the same reason; I know I'll be miserable writing it, but having done that, it'll look great on my CV, and might bring me some benefits. For me, most of the worth to be doing category is stuff I don't enjoy, yet I…
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Arguably a lot of people are driven to be entrepreneurs because of the status. The issue with the bankers is that they’re trapped in a local maximum. A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS. I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on…
> A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS. Not even close. Regardless of the high esteem we may hold them in, the average person just sees them that you list as rich dorks. Compare and contrast with say Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio who, to use a stock phrase, men want to be and women want to be with.
But our family wasn't in great financial shape. Small expenses became debts, parents always fighting or stressed about money, just general family stress. Classic stretched middle class family, perhaps a bit more than others.
But we moved anyway, and it was great. Stress went down, and as each of us turned 16 my parents bought us (cheap) cars and we started working.
Sharing rooms was annoying but really didn't impact us much. Lower stress was great, and a little pressure to get jobs got all of us a head start on working and paying for stuff (gas, insurance, fast food, cell phones, outings with friends) during high school.
We are all successful and happy today. But I bet a lot of people thought we were losers when we left the big house. And if we had waited until we HAD to leave the big house, we would be losers.
The most expensive display of status that I see around my friends is having a new car. I have a 12 year old beautiful BMW that was created just after the design refresh. It's expensive to maintain, but far not as much as buying a new car. My friends are trying to pressure me to upgrade it to a newer one, but I see that just as money going out of the window that goes to compound investment right now. Also in the US I…
May as well drive an old corolla or prius and save your cash.
Nikola Tesla is one of the greatest inventors in recent memories and he had this gift. His first job under Edison in America had a not so glamorous title. I actually wrote about it in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-pr...
On the flip side, being comfortable staying in a low status role over a long period of time where the role does not provide opportunities for learning and doing hard things might be a sign of lack of ambition.
I'll always remember growing up when we moved from a big house (2000 sq ft) to a little apartment (700 sq ft). My parents didn't lose their jobs, maybe a few expensive things hit but really there was no obvious reason to an outsider. We could have stayed in the big house and gotten by. But our family wasn't in great financial shape. Small expenses became debts, parents always fighting or stressed about money, just ge…
I hope I can teach and model this lesson well for my son.
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but that’s just the point, when you break down social structures into finer and finer units (the individual, at the limit), you realize that status has all sorts, and is relative to many social groups. hence, the position that statuses outnumber people through both the multidimensionality of social groups as well as the multidimensionality of status itself. a singular global social order is a fiction we don’t have to…
Personally, I think that extreme relativistic stance waters down the idea of "social" status to be meaningless because it negates the social aspect. At that point, it's no different than saying "people chase what they value". That's trivially obvious; the chasing of social status is a subset criteria meant to say "people chase what they value, and what they value is social standing defined by their desired in-group".…
and again, that's the point. neither extreme is realistic, but we have a bias toward one that we should actively compensate for. most of our esteem derives for the few hundred to a few thousand people that forms our social system, but our thinking tends to stray to where we stand in the wider, unfathomable society. it's a component of why social media tends to be corrosive rather than creative and supportive.
Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening. Then they sheepishly…
> Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening. > Then they sheepis…
The superficiality of modern positivity obsession is a source of a lot of problems, because people don't have a tight-knit network who will be there for each other through thick and thin.
The Twitter thread explores some ideas why this may be the case. However, quickly skimming through it, they miss the most obvious one. For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. So there's no 'willingness' really to it, it's just that status doesn't really exist. The way they see themselves and how they measure their success has literally nothing to…
> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all. I read a number of biographies of great US presidents in the last year, and found it fascinating to see that pretty much all of them were i…
Agree. I refer to this as meaningful work. It can be difficult to describe to others why it is important, but it is important to them at that time.
The joy of such work is that status does not weigh upon it as much as other endeavors. I suspect some of this success reverse-engineering efforts sometimes runs ramshod over non-extrinsic motivations because they're not as apparent, especially to the authors of such pieces.