The Ultimate Guide To Getting Nowhere In Life

http://garyharan.com/2010/04/18/the-ultimate-guide-to-getting-nowhere-in-life.html

by xutopia • 16 years ago

184 86 16 years ago

tigerthink• 16 years ago

Even the life he describes is pretty damn good by historical standards.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I think his idea of failure is a lot of people's idea of success: a reasonably comfortable 40 hour/wk job that pays well and doesn't involve risks of getting your arm chopped off in machinery, and a bunch of free time & money to spend on entertainment. Not what I'd choose to do, but neither are lots of things; I wouldn't choose to work at a tech company that expects you to carry a pager, work nights/weekends, and thinks it owns your life, either.

(I do agree that saving a bit of money is good for pretty much everyone; buffers come in handy.)

mmastrac• 16 years ago

Well said. A 9-5 job is a great way for time to disappear into a void that you'll never get back. If you're not paying attention, you'll lose years to something like this.

I know everyone isn't suited for entrepreneurial life, but as a talented developer you can always join a startup as employee 5+ and get a reasonable amount of security and pay, with a chance of a good-sized upside.

Even if you're happy in a 9-5, medium/big company job, do yourself a favour and keep that buffer around. There are so many things you can do with it to improve you life and buy yourself freedom - more than just buying stuff for cash.

Qz4• 16 years ago

"I know everyone isn't suited for entrepreneurial life..."

Is that because they started out that way, or because society tells them they should get 9-to-5 jobs and be happy about it?

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

I think it's because they started out that way! Of course, almost any skill or desire can be learned, but everyone is born into this world with their own unique set of aptitudes and weaknesses. The unique amalgamation found in each person lends its owner to certain roles and stations in life where excellence is easier to achieve.

Some people are perfectly OK working for someone else. They enjoy the labor of it, they enjoy the pay, they enjoy the company, they enjoy the security and relative comfort and anonymity. It doesn't really bother them that someone else is making 3x more off of the work performed than they are. That's OK. There's all kinds of people who are OK with this idea, too, but believe me that it's much better for some types to remain content with this than to branch out.

Some people are not content with that setup. They want to change things, they want to control how they spend their time (i.e. no hard 9-5 commitment), they want to keep the money their labors produce, they want to direct and lead and organize and control the intelligences and powers for their ends. This is OK and good too.

There's just different types of people in the world. We need employees, both employees on the way to independence and employees who don't mind becoming company men. It's good to have both.

The real thing that should be universal is a plan to develop financial independence such that one is never forced to work a job after it turns south, and such that people do not have to live in fear of their bosses. Of course, many bosses get mad at this idea because it weakens their ability to control their employees.

lepht• 16 years ago

Ha. By these standards I am way ahead of the game. How many GamerPoints for this "nothing" achievement?

smiler• 16 years ago

How demeaning. Agree with some of it but notice how there is nothing here about anything else you might like to do with your life outside of having a job and owning a business. Like a wife and a family.

A 9-5 job is pretty much great in those circumstances if you just want to enjoy life - I work for a 10 person company and I've seen what the owner has gone through in the last 10 years it's been going - he has no life. Obviously it doesn't have to be like that for everyone, but if I have to choose between my family and slogging my guts out for something which may or not pay off and consume all my time - I know which one I'd pick.

azanar2• 16 years ago

You're right about the matter of wife and family, but not in way most people believe they are right about it. There is a wide chasm between finding joy in something, and feeling the compulsion to sacrifice for it.

That you find joy in your family is fantastic, if only because you've found something to enjoy. That your boss has been slogging away for ten years on his business is fantastic, as long as his enjoyment of is worth more to him than the things he's not done. So long as he or you don't regret it.

The important difference is between compulsion and choice; or even more dangerously, a choice that is made, and then justified retroactively as a compulsion.

It isn't worth itemizing all of the things people are compelled to, except that this list is a somewhat abbreviated version of them: get a good (read: easy) 9-5 job; spend money as catharsis; and let other people take the lesser worn path and, if they succeed, live their joy secondhand as much as you can. Also on the list: having a wife and children. They are defaults, and I'm not the first to say that defaults can be quite compelling, and can be just as easy to pass off as compulsions afterward.

Keep in mind, these being external compulsions does not mean that everyone does them for that reason. It just means you have to be more careful about how much of your desire is actual desire, and how much is just aimless drift.

Doing things just through compulsion rarely leads to enjoyment. It might have been when the compulsions weren't just compulsions, but a lot of what we feel compelled to do is fossilized wisdom from what other people would have thought would make them happy, and maybe it did for a few people. The rest are still waiting for the pay off, or have just given up and have become satisfied being content and comfortable.

I don't think most people have to settle. I think the problem is a higher level than the author gets at in his essay: even when people have options, they feel compelled not to pursue them. In the worse case, they feel compelled to destroy those options -- I've seen this happen, and it is tragic. I don't think it has to be this way.

I don't think you're doing wrong, btw. But your comment reminded me of all the times I've seen people sacrificing to compulsion at the expense of fulfillment; it seemed worthwhile to get those thoughts out there. :-)

keeptrying2• 16 years ago

"even when people have options, they feel compelled not to pursue them"

Thats a really good point and its scary when you see it all around you. And I think the reason it happens is because you dont see anyone else pursuing those options.

I have, recently, moved out to Queens and now live with roommates so as to save money. previously I had my own 1 bedroom in Manhattan. No one at work understands why I did this.

The one thing I've learned though is that if I get a negative reaction from my co-workers then I might be doing something right :) ...

xutopia2• 16 years ago

(Disclaimer I'm the author of the post)

Having a family and moving forward in your career are not incompatible. I should have used "dead end job" instead of "9-5" job. I didn't mean that working more hours and spending time away from your family is something you should be doing. Sorry about making it sound that way.

The post was about not waisting your potential, stopping bad financial habits and living your passions.

hobb0001• 16 years ago

I acknowledge your clarification and I agree with what YOU have said, but let me rant a little against the startup mentality that is prevalent here on HN. The general attitude seems to be that you're wasting your one chance at living unless you haven't accomplished something bigger than yourself and have left a legacy. It is a rousing sentiment, but yet, at the end of the day, I can't help but be sobered by the poem Ozymandius. Yes, you've left a legacy, but only for one, maybe two, generations before that too is forgotten:

  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Speaking of poems, poets would tell you that you've wasted your life unless you've loved; loved so deeply that you die a little when it is lost. So which is it? Legacy? Success? Love? Family?

In the end, I think you've nailed it with your last sentence: living your passions. If your passion is, literally, passion, then love. Make love your life. If your passion is external admiration, then succeed. (Please don't become a doctor or lawyer if your goal is admiration. Only do so if your passion is helping the sick or defending justice.) But to your point, at the end of your life, make sure you don't have a 100" flat-panel TV and a mountain of regrets.

araneae3• 16 years ago

I think his offhand implication that reading books is superior to TV is wrong.

Most fiction has exactly the same purpose and function on TV, which is to entertain. Yes, reading some books makes you "cultured" but so does TV; just to a different culture. I consider watching all the latest sci fi to be just as "culturing" as reading all the latest sci fi.

BoppreH4• 16 years ago

Reading makes you better at reading (duh) and writing. Two essential skills that are used daily.

What skills does your TV gives to you?

zackattack2• 16 years ago

Ability to connect with strangers through mutual ties to 'pop culture'

nostrademons3• 16 years ago

Passively sitting down with the latest Dan Brown novel won't make you any better at reading or writing. Sitting down with a novel that's just beyond your comfort zone (say, Dostoevsky if you're used to Dan Brown) will make you better at reading, and sitting down with any novel and actively paying attention to how the writer shapes the story with words will make you better at writing. But that's an apples-to-sushi comparison: it takes a lot more mental effort to actively engage with a book than it does to passively sit in front of a TV. A more appropriate comparison would be actively reading vs. playing Starcraft, which gives you a bunch of essential skills, eg. multitasking, resource management, positioning & prioritization, etc.

Basically, you get out of any activity what you put into it. If you put zero effort into reading, you're going to get zero skill out of it.

araneae3• 16 years ago

That would be a good point if I were 8 years old.

However, my vocabulary is unlikely to increase anymore.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

I find reading a book engages and involves my mind much more. I'm not going to argue superiority, but there's a reason watching TV is known in slang as 'vegging out'.

natrius• 16 years ago

Reading is entertainment that requires thought and imagination. While you're reading, it's easy and common to stop and reflect over what has just been said. Not so with video.

When you watch a sci fi movie, you see the world the filmmaker has built. When you read a sci fi book, you build the world the author describes in your head. Value judgments aside, they're very different experiences.

argv_empty2• 16 years ago

And if the sci-fi is good, then regardless of medium, I stop and reflect on the world or situation being described and the questions it raises.

_bfhp4• 16 years ago

Theodore Roosevelt read two books a day and could recite quotations from them years later.

The average TV in the US is on 6 hours per day.

Would you rather be the average American or Theodore Roosevelt?

j_baker2• 16 years ago

The average American. Theodore Roosevelt is dead after all. :-)

tomjen32• 16 years ago

He was also one of the original war mongers.

Considering that, I would prefer the average American.

Tycho3• 16 years ago

Two books a day? How's that possible?

Say each book is 300 pages and he reads 30 pages an hour (generous). It would typically take 20 hours to finish two books. That leaves 4 hours to sleep, eat, wash, and do his job.

Oh but he read really fast? That's just about as useful as watching a movie in fast-forward.

olliesaunders• 16 years ago

Making TV costs lots of money so they only make shows to attract large audiences. Because writing books is relatively cheap you get books for all kinds of audiences, importantly you get books aimed at smart people. My comments siblings provide examples of this.

_bfhp4• 16 years ago

What makes these inverse guides so appealing, anyway...

hugh3• 16 years ago

I don't know. It's really just a cheap trick that makes half-assed advice sound much cleverer than it really is. But it works!

chipsy• 16 years ago

We need to go one step further and make inverse inverse guides: "How to not fail at not failing" etc.

kalid• 16 years ago

I really dislike these inverse guides -- they fight a strawman by negating an obviously false statement.

You see this in programming essays, where people show examples of absurd commenting (i++; // increment i). Yes, yes, we're reasonably intelligent readers know that's bad -- show us an example of nuanced commenting, or nuanced thinking!

sophacles• 16 years ago

Sometimes there is more than one "correct" method. In a lot of those cases, the "wrong" way is pretty specific, or at least tightly constrained. At such times, it is easier to explain that instead of explaining a large group of extremely different options.

Other times, it is just a simple case of "I don't know what works, but I know what doesn't work". This allows the next person to not make that mistake.

KirinDave• 16 years ago

So, if I'm reading it correctly, it seems like his guide says: if you're rich and educated, you'll have more opportunities and be less stressed.

That's pretty insightful. You'd think someone would have realized that by now.

_bfhp4• 16 years ago

Do not EVER underestimate the power of beer and MTV again.

ssouth• 16 years ago

The author's point is precisely that this sort of freedom is available to more than just a wealthy elite. After all, it's not the "rich and educated" living paycheque-to-paycheque and wasting away in dead-end jobs.

j_baker2• 16 years ago

I think this is more a guide to becoming a normal American than anything else. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that either. Can you imagine what life would be like if everyone were a great hacker bent on changing the world to suit them?

olefoo• 16 years ago

Much more interesting and dangerous that's for sure. Although in my limited experience great hackers aren't necessarily in it to change the world but to discover how it works, sometimes by creating things that were supposed to be impossible.

kyro• 16 years ago

I know many people who have/do the first 3 things on that list and probably find more joy in their lives than this guy gets out of looking at the temporary traffic spike hitting is blog because of a really demeaning post he wrote up in no more than 5 minutes.

Happiness and life fulfillment are very much found in the 9-to-5, pay-check-to-pay-check demographic of society. There are things in life one must attend to that likely force people to get 9-to-5's. You know, like a wife and kids. And then there are those who are content with what they have and don't carry that gene that gives one grandiose visions of changing the world. There's nothing wrong with having that trait, I think I've got it, but you should accept the fact that there are people that are happy with their day-to-day jobs. Not everyone is a 22yr. old college grad who can explore and take on the world with little to no financial responsibilities destined to change the world in some unprecedented and legendary way.

azanar2• 16 years ago

Happiness and life fulfillment are very much found in the 9-to-5, pay-check-to-pay-check demographic of society.

I wish this were true. The impression I get is more of numb, passive contentment, at least from enough people in this demographic that it is bothersome. They seem to have traded happiness and fulfillment for the image of happiness and fulfillment, and it is difficult to tell the difference until you ask the hard questions that make them feel uncomfortable and defensive. That's why most people don't, and that is why the groups are assume to intersect perfectly.

There are things in life one must attend to that likely force people to get 9-to-5's. You know, like a wife and kids.

How much of this is a must, and how much is a result of choices they made? And how much of this forcing is a result of emotional and social pressure, as a result if imminent, tangible risk? That is, how much is a result of wanting to convince others that one is a responsible parent, as opposed to one actually being irresponsible?

argv_empty2• 16 years ago

They seem to have traded happiness and fulfillment for the image of happiness and fulfillment, and it is difficult to tell the difference until you ask the hard questions that make them feel uncomfortable and defensive.

Or perhaps a person took such a job because his life goals simply do not relate to work. Being another cog in a cube farm may not be interesting itself, but it can be used as a source of funding for things that genuinely are. A 9-to-5 isn't my weapon of choice here (since some things I find interesting also happen to be readily marketable skills), but it is an effective one.

xutopia2• 16 years ago

I wished I wrote that blog post in just 5 minutes. I actually spent a couple hours on the first draft but was told it wasn't punchy enough. The second draft took almost as much time the first.

The main mistake I made in this post is using the term 9-5 instead of dead end. I didn't mean that you should work 90 hours a week, far from it. As my short bio on my blog says "I'm a passionate father" and I think that moving forward in your career are totally compatible with that.

keeptrying2• 16 years ago

"Happiness and life fulfillment are very much found in the 9-to-5, pay-check-to-pay-check demographic of society."

I wish this were true because then I would not be trying to get away from a 9-to-5 job which pays very handsomely with no overtime.

The real reason that a 9-to-5 is not fulfilling is because ,as an employee, you are not measured by how much you create. The metrics are a bunch of bogus crap some HR dude listed down before he had to leave to pick up his kids at 5pm. So your forced to do things which are usually unfulfilling and a lot of times inconsequential to the business and your own development.

Add that to dreary meetings, performance reviews which leave you feeling violated and managers who check whether your in on time instead of what you've produced makes for a $hit of a day. Do it 223 times a year and you'll soon realize that 9-to-5 is not about happiness or fulfillment.

There are places like Google where this may not be true but this is par for the course for every job I've worked at.

nostrademons3• 16 years ago

Name names? There are an awful lot of prospective entrepreneurs on this site who are just looking for a bunch of big, dumb, complacent tech companies to uproot.

khelloworld• 16 years ago

"(CNN) -- Lars and Jens Rasmussen were broke and jobless -- with only $16 between them -- when they made it big in the Web world by selling their idea for Google Maps."

SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/27/rasmussen.brothers.google...

I'm pretty sure these guys got somewhere even without a cushion of money under their bums.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure just how poor and underprivileged they were; it sounds like not getting a job and doing a startup instead was a choice, and that initially at least there was a cushion of money. Lars Rasmussen got a PhD from Berkeley in 1998, and then by 2003 somehow ended up in Australia, where he founded a tech startup and sold to Google within the year. Most actual poor people can't buy a plane ticket to Australia!

c00p3r• 16 years ago

5) Play Farmville.

6) Browse 4chan.

paul9290• 16 years ago

I think those are two different demographics.

Those who play farmville are the ones this posts is speaking about. While the 4chan crowd as a whole are a young computer literate and savvy crowd. Though correct me if that demographic assumption is incorrect.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

4chan is basically HN, except that on 4chan, everyone has a more reasonable perspective about their worth and ability. Oh, and you can post pictures.

FlemishBeeCycle• 16 years ago

Reader base meet article.

CaseOfEmergency• 16 years ago

I don't need a guide for that, I do just fine on my own.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

I read a lot of books (and sometimes even write them), but I don't see a lot of value in reading over watching TV. I treat both as something to do when I don't feel like doing anything that requires thinking. If you like TV, watch TV. If you like reading, read. Or do both.

Psyonic• 16 years ago

If you are talking about escapist fiction, I would agree with you, but some books definitely require thinking. That said, I think some TV does as well.

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

Hacker News - and blogs in general - are another way to live vicariously from your couch.

(Thank goodness for noprocrast!)

cdr2• 16 years ago

Thank goodness for LeechBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

It's like noprocrast for everything. (Although I wish they hadn't mangled the UI in the last update.)

foenix• 16 years ago

The nice thing about leechblock is that it lets you set up a set amount of time per hour on particular sites.

Unfortunately, this means I get cut off mid-sen

nreece• 16 years ago

  Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and
  get paid just enough money not to quit.

  --George Carlin

_bfhp4• 16 years ago

A Carlin quote is just cheating. D:

nova• 16 years ago

Also called marginal utility.

ck2• 16 years ago

Step 5: Write blog posts telling people how to live their lives.

(extra points for preaching to the choir)

dsplittgerber• 16 years ago

What's even more interesting than the article is one's reaction to it. So telling which aspects one immediately focuses on. It's always about oneself.

rmundo• 16 years ago

Some of my most cherished friends view work purely as a way to support their family and lifestyle. They don't worry about getting nowhere; in a sense, they're exactly where they want to be already.

Attention-grabbing title aside, this is a great article for people who would like to do something interesting but feel that they "can't" for various reasons or who aren't sure how to start. I can think of several people in high school or college who would appreciate this article.

(I really like the color scheme and font choices, btw!)

sukuriant• 16 years ago

Ok, so what if you're already in the rut this article describes. This accomplishes little for the people that are already stuck in this life and dissatisfied in it, but feel trapped.

Well, no, that's not fair. It makes them feel worse. Nice try, but fail.

patience• 16 years ago

wow - this is basically a not-so-thinly-veiled Horatio Alger rehash with a condescending sense of humor. Life is so simple when you mistake other people's problems as errors in judgment. Thanks, Superman - you've saved the day once again. but what do you expect from a guy who, according to his bio, "[brings] wines to the market in bold new ways." No thanks. A lá Gang of Four, I'll get drunk on cheap wine instead.

Plus, it's a flawed analysis because on the one hand he's critiquing a particular aspect of capitalism (the consumerist side - what did he think was going to happen with all those advertisements and credit cards), while still maintaining that as a whole it works (he proudly states he's an "entrepreneur," who can balance work and family (subtext: so why shouldn't you?)). What's more, his arrogance turns into hypocrisy, because as an entrepreneur, whether he wants to admit it or not, he profits off of the backs of other people, the same kind of people that make poor decisions regarding long-term financial matters. As a matter of style, his flippancy which lacks the slightest modicum of decorum is insulting, while his failure to call into question the root, systemic causes to the problems he outlines is inexcusable.

The Ultimate Guide To Getting Nowhere In Life

Related Stories