if you can control your urges: make the $1.2Mil, live as you're making $150K and do it for x years. After that find a job you love.
America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
161–170 of 475 posts
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I exist in a capitalist economy. I make a number on a spreadsheet a bit larger and then I go home and live a meaningful life using, in part, the money I've earned doing so. I'd be hard-pressed to do that under any other economic system that's ever been tried.
> I exist in a capitalist economy. If you live in the modern developed world, you probably live in a mixed market economy that has incorporated many structures advocated by socialist critics of capitalism (in many places some straight out the Communist Manifesto), rather than an actually capitalist system. And it's quite likely that, for those outside of the bourgeoisie—and even much of the petit bourgeoisie, as much…
OK, fine, I don't mind you negating my claim as long as you agree it also negates minikites's!
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah... I literally don't buy it. High Cost of Living city has nothing to do with needing $500k/yr in earnings (post tax). What kind of mortgage and car do you have that? Simple answer... that's a $10M house or a $2M car or half of each of those. Besides the fact that if you're earning $1.2M salary, you're taking home other bonus/stock that are comparable. Getting locked into this sort of lifestyle is a choice not dr…
The median annual earnings of palo altans is about $400k/year. That's probably workable for cheaper areas like south palo alto where a house built in the 80s will run you $2.5 mil. Move closer to downtown and you could easily double or triple your necessary annual take.
"According to Census data, the median household income in Palo Alto is $137,000 a year, while the US average is $57,600"
from: https://www.cnet.com/news/silicon-valley-middle-class-earns-...
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how being temporary means that a thing lacks meaning.
How could anything mean anything when pretty soon (in a cosmological sense) there won't be any such thing as a mind in which meaning could exist?
Things have meaning right now during your existence. I honestly don't see how the impermanence of your existence impacts that.
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#165- He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said. Sounds like a good wife to me, and this "pay cut" is making 500k-600k instead of 1.2 million, what world are these people living in that you can't give up a job that you hate because you can't…
>what world are these people living in that you can't give up a job that you hate because you can't afford to live on 500-600k. New York City
The median income for NYC is $57,000. Surely 10X what a typical person makes is enough for a family to get by, it's just not enough for the lifestyle they want.
Source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> maybe people need some religion in their lives to give direction and meaning I can't just accept dogma because I'm miserable. I can't just say 2+2=5 even if it would make me feel better. Religion isn't something you can just pick up like pilates. If life is inherently without meaning or direction, I'd rather go with that and be true to myself than refract the universe through some doctrine I understand to be false.…
Practicing regularly to increase self-knowledge, thinking spiritually, reflecting on your relation to the world – do you not consider that a religion? Organized Christianity is just one flavor.
> Practicing regularly to increase self-knowledge, thinking spiritually, reflecting on your relation to the world – do you not consider that a religion?
I'd call that mindfulness not religion.
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#167I just don't understand this at all. If you can earn a million a year, do it for 3-5 years, never have to work again, and pursue your passions in life. I think the problem for most workers is the lifetime of toil, not the meaninglessness of the work. I'd happily dig ditches for 8-12 hours a day for 3 years if I knew I was completely financially independent with millions in the bank that. Actually, I'd rather do that…
Have you actually dug ditches for a few weeks? It's a popular rhetorical device but I wonder how many engineers have actually done stints of hard labor.
I have, yes. I've also framed homes, roofed homes, and water proofed basements. I spent some time landscaping. I've held a variety of manual labor jobs, from working fields to construction to warehouses and factory floors to the military. Today, I'm a team lead and senior software engineer.
I'd also rather be outside again all day, working with and alongside people, physically and towards goals we can visualize, doing tasks that we all understand well and can articulate in an accurate way, and cultivating a genuine sense of camaraderie. Not the sort of weird brogrammer nonsense that is frequently encountered in our industry and which is oftentimes confused with camaraderie.
I pull a lot of my previous lives experience in to my work today and I spend a lot of time working very closely with my colleagues, but it's not the same. I don't end a day with the same sense of purpose or belonging that I experienced with physically demanding jobs. I got close, once, but it was a shared experience between myself and one colleague, as opposed to a team, and it was because of circumstances that aren't exactly repeatable in a meaningful way.
edit/ Of course, the above is making some assumptions that probably don't hold. There is genuinely something that I miss from physically demanding work that can't be found or replicated with the work that I do today (or, perhaps it's just that I have failed to find or replicate it). But, I'm also dramatically better compensated and live a nearly fully autonomous life today, too. These are just the trade-offs that we make, I suppose.
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#168The rich are depressed, the middle-class is shrinking and fearful, the poor are hopeless. I'm gonna take a leap here and say maybe people need some religion in their lives to give direction and meaning. I found it interesting that a person in the article who made $1.2M a year was still depressed in thinking they were wasting their lives and it was all meaningless. I ask myself, does this person have children? a famil…
beware of journalism masquerading as statistical analysis. This is useful as an interesting and entertaining serioes of anecdotes, not as a guide to what is actually taking place.
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#169The rich are depressed, the middle-class is shrinking and fearful, the poor are hopeless. I'm gonna take a leap here and say maybe people need some religion in their lives to give direction and meaning. I found it interesting that a person in the article who made $1.2M a year was still depressed in thinking they were wasting their lives and it was all meaningless. I ask myself, does this person have children? a famil…
I have individual faith and it's arisen out of a general respect for nature and acceptance of existential philosophical crises but... I'm never setting foot in a church. Organized religion in America is a toxic and terrible institution.
When I was growing up my parents were friends with a couple that had moved up from Georgia, as I grew older I learned that they have moved there after the father had been the pastor of a church and, when their daughter was born with down's syndrome. Due to the birth he had taken a sabbatical from preaching to raise his daughter, and while they were absent they became ostracized by the community. They were given the southern shame treatment and cut off from friends until they gave in and just moved up to New England.
While they were being shamed by their neighbors everything else carried on as normal, those neighbors went to church and prayed with everyone else and I outright reject any institution that supports that kind of behavior.
Organized religion is responsible to so many ills in modern society.
Re: America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
#170The rich are depressed, the middle-class is shrinking and fearful, the poor are hopeless. I'm gonna take a leap here and say maybe people need some religion in their lives to give direction and meaning. I found it interesting that a person in the article who made $1.2M a year was still depressed in thinking they were wasting their lives and it was all meaningless. I ask myself, does this person have children? a famil…
Because a 10% tithe is definitely something the shrinking middle class and the hopeless lower class can afford. But putting that aside this sentiment of "look how bad things seem for people, religion can help" reeks of predatory behavior. If none turn towards whatever god you preach in times of plenty then what is left? To strike in a moment of weakness? To shift blame from whatever problems could be solved to instea…
It's increasingly secular right now. But religions grow and shrink like fashions and a new clutch may rise to fill the evident vacuum.