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The most precious resource is agency

simonsarris.substack.com

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Re: The most precious resource is agency

#241

Post by oefnak »

agent008t wrote: post #199
leoedin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a 14 month year old. The daily grind is relentless. But it's not miserable. I've watched a tiny helpless creature turn into a curious little person who can walk around and play with things, who gives me big smiles and hugs when he sees me, who takes real joy in such stupid things (current obsession: bike helmets). It's hard to quantify why that's a good thing - much like to many of my friends the idea of vol…

But how did you decide that this is what you wanted? It is a big, life-changing decision to make. Did you wake up one morning and think, 'you know what, having a child would really make my life a lot better'? Or had you been looking forward to becoming a parent from an early age, and were just looking for the right time? E.g. I certainly didn't even think of it when I was 16 - I was dreaming of other things. Nothing…

For me it played a big role that I wanted my kids to have grandparents for as long as possible, since I lost mine relatively early. Also the other way around, for my parents it is nice to have grandchildren now too.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#242

Post by bluefirebrand »

malydok wrote: post #225
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That brings up an old memory for me: I used to work as a lifeguard at a pool for three or four years as I was going through uni. Nothing glamorous in that work, it's just very loosely managing young males showing off in front of young females. Except this one time some kid jumped in the deep end and whilst he surfaced, he couldn't reach the top of the side of the pool in order to stay at the surface, he was clutching…

It's an interesting fact that one could save many lives by donating to charities and yet wouldn't feel quite the same way about it. Clicking "donate" on a screen and filling in credit card details isn't as thrilling an experience as yours even if it achieves no less.

Charities aren't appealing not just because you don't feel as connected to outcomes, but because we know many of them pay out big paycheques to execs and other overhead to the point where barely any of our donations are put to good use.

Maybe just being cynical about it, but if I help out at a soup kitchen I know I'm helping people, when I donate I am just getting a tax credit and boosting a charity's executive bonuses.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#243

Post by bjornsing »

tluyben2 wrote: post #157
papito wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because risk. Rich, privileged people can try different things with zero risk of becoming destitute. And that's how they practically stumble into new opportunities. Adam Neumann was making collapsible heels and toddler knee-pads before he decided to try the pyramid that is WeWork, which ultimately bought him a private jet and multiple houses. Me? I didn't have a chance to "try" things. My room for error was zero . Mu…

> Because risk. Rich, privileged people can try different things with zero risk of becoming destitute You can do that as well in many EU countries. Without being rich.

> You can do that as well in many EU countries. Without being rich.

But, interestingly, few people do. And those who do seem to take on less risk than their counterparts in the US.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#245

Post by Godel_unicode »

csomar wrote: post #198
PaulRobinson wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just nonsense advice. The entire point of retirement savings is that at some point you can stop working. FU money is just about timing. You can change that timing. 1. Reduce outgoings. It's easier to have FU money if the amount you need to be able to say "FU" is smaller, because you've perfected the art of living on a little less than most. Most people's outgoings grow to meet their incomes: resist that. You d…

> Learn about compound returns a little more. $500 a month at 8% (typical market returns recently), and over 10 years gives you back $92k - a $32k profit on the $60k you put in. You might want to update your models. If interest rates will remain at 0 (or get negative like in Europe), you'd be lucky with 0-1% return.

There are plenty of asset classes which are quite safe and return >5%. Saving money in a "savings" account was never a good idea (outside of an emergency fund).

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#246

Post by bjornsing »

inglor_cz wrote: post #221
tluyben2 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been living there for almost 50 years. Works fine.

We don't seem to generate much more innovation than our overseas cousins, though. A safety net may lead some people to experiment and play with things, others to slouching off. This even applies outside the public sphere. A stereotype of a bored millionaire's son with no energy to do anything substantial exists for a reason.

Sadly I think it also promotes (overt) envy and crab mentality. Many people use their safety to pull others down rather than try to excel. It pains me to say this, and I wish it wasn’t so, but it seems to me that people only accept meritocracy when there is some kind of external threat…

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#247

Post by frequent »

The developer in me says life and our society are like open source software. A gigantic piece of code constantly being rewritten and growing exponentially over time. Too much for anyone to truly grasp in its completeness as time progresses, but also not purely spaghetti code, so you can always break it down into smaller components one can eventually understand. Of course, like the author argues, you can use this software without ever caring or wondering about its inner workings. Or you can try to make contributions. However, there are no contribution guidelines for life. "Usefulness" depends on everyones' individual definition (improve the kernel or code readability) and "capacity to act" doesn't age well (I started hacking with jQuery). A contribution can be anything that may leave an impression on someone - a single person or any amount of people, a good or (for sake of completeness) a bad impression, something forgotten after an instant or something passed on for generations in some form or another - legacy contributions that eventually also get rewritten over time. Personally, I don't think the results matter as much as trying to make these contributions. After all, not all merge-requests make it into production code, but they are all worthy efforts of trying to improve small parts of the software of life and move our society forward.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#248

Post by ehnto »

bjornsing wrote: post #239
ehnto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried both sides of the coin and have settled for somewhere in the middle, which for me is contracting. For myself, I burned out pretty hard on 9-5 work, so I don't take on a full time workload and I don't take on work that requires butt-in-seat engagment, even remotely. In that way I retain full agency over my time, and great flexibility in when I work. I work when I am feeling the most effective, and I can e…

I’m starting to think this is the direction I want to go in. The butts-in-seats culture is strong here in Sweden though (strangely upheld by the butts in the seats themselves). So I’m a bit worried it will be a “dead end career wise” and not sustainable until retirement (I’m 43). Any thoughts on this? How do you find work and what makes you think you will continue to find work for 10, 15 or 20 years?

My thought is that if I can't find work as a contractor then I'd have as little chance at finding work at a company, so it may be time to retrain anyway.

I am assuming you're a software developer, I'm by no means an expert on contracting, but my two recommendations are: Specialize in a domain, and stay on the technology bandwagon. You can't pin your career on a technology, they go obsolete too fast, but you can specialize in an industry domain.

I specialized in eCommerce, and I've had to use dozens of different technologies, each project brings in a new tech stack and a new set of idioms. I have a friend in motorsport/automotive software, which is an exciting field by the sounds of it. There are dozens of industries that need software but aren't solely software companies, and I think that's where much contract work is.

I am ideologically against the rapid technology swapping our industry loves, I really prefer to dig in deep to a framework or stack, but this is work so I keep my eyes up and forward. Sometimes all you need is to recognize the buzzword, say "Yep I've heard of that", then go home and do some research to make sure you can pull it off before accepting the contract.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#249

Post by fellowniusmonk »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #191

The problem with the article is that it only uses examples of extra ordinary people. Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius. Most people who flunk out or drop out of school do not become billionaires and neither will you. Most people who decide to give it their all and become various forms of artists will never be famous, noticed no wealty or admired (Though on a nano scale you may have…

I started working fulltime at 15 (illegally) to pay for my family to have a place to live. I was not able to attend college and I technically can't prove I ever graduated HS. I literally carried buckets of shit as a kid for my family of 7 we were so poor. My parents/family had taken the lions share of my earned money until they died in my early twenties.

I am now in the 1% of global earnings, and every step has been truly awful degradation as I have had 0 negotiating leverage and just learned to do what others hate because you get paid more for it.

I 100% guarantee that in the age of the internet there are more "self made" millionaire teenagers than at any point in history. And that puts the lie to the core feeling he puts out (which to be fair he does contradict multiple times) that there is less opportunity for agency now than previously, as always the sense of ones own childhood agency is still dependent on the quality/existence of your parents, the personality of the child and family/environmental wealth.

This article has a true premise in its title, autonomy and agency do matter very much, but the authors inability to grasp that starting conditions are the sole determining factor for any organisms global boundaries of success/failure are telling and they clearly romanticize the stories of extreme outliers and disregard data for narrative.

I 100% agree, this individual is romanticizing things he doesn't understand and the article has a lot of generally poor thinking.

Base rate fallacy gets people every time, the idea that opportunities for agency have decreased is absurd.

Also he apparently has a big thing for allowing kids to build full on buildings because he brings it up twice... which I don't think has ever been generally acceptable.

He should read books like little house on the prairie to get a better idea of how poor childhood opportunity has been throughout history.

Re: The most precious resource is agency

#250

Post by castlecrasher2 »

jkhdigital wrote: post #40
sillysaurusx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went and did the other side, living nontraditionally and trying to be what I wanted. I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money. My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters. The work can be the most boring, crud-type work. As long as you’re working with people you like on something vague…

Amen. I’m a sober alcoholic, and if I died tomorrow I’d be content knowing that I did at least one worthwhile thing with the time I had: I helped another alcoholic, a 23 year old man who tried to kill himself shortly before I met him, get sober and start working and move out of his mom’s basement and stand up straight and look other people in the eyes and then go and help a few other people stop drinking. Not a singl…

>why didn’t they tell us it was this simple?

Say what you want about the ills that come with it, but religion has been telling us this since the dawn of time.

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