Someone is stealing your life (1990)

http://www.lycaeum.org/mv/M2/ventura.html

by zizek • 15 years ago

167 157 15 years ago

lycaeum.org

swombat• 15 years ago

It's easy to be indignant when you wilfully misunderstand and/or ignore the fundamental principles of human society.

paganel• 15 years ago

> It's easy to be indignant when you wilfully misunderstand and/or ignore the fundamental principles of human society.

Which, I guess, is exploitation :)

exit2• 15 years ago

foljs comment shouldn't have been flagged. some libertarian probably took offense at the mention of scandinavia:

1 point by foljs 43 minutes ago | link [dead]

It's also easy to believe that what goes on in your small part of the world is according to the "fundamental principles of human society".

Most of the shit you take from your employers wouldn't fly on advanced Western European (inc. Scandinavian) countries.

To quote G. Bernard Shaw, "he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

All of foljs's comments are dead, starting 47 days ago. Most likely the automated filter believes he is a spammer. Or perhaps moderators killed him for trollish behavior (I don't know if they do this or not, but I know the spam filter occurs).

It has nothing to do with whatever he posted in this thread.

lionhearted4• 15 years ago

> On the other hand - or so they say - you're free, and if you don't like your job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming an "independent" entrepreneur. But you're only as independent as your credit rating. And to compete in the business community, you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with.

The whole piece is like that.

Self-defeating. Blame others for problems. Finding trivial problems insurmountable. And also - flat out false.

He overlooks some basic things - like that you can work part time, freelance, or save up your money and then not work for a few years.

Some jobs and are enjoyable and people like their work.

There's no rule that says you have to be a shitty boss.

You don't need a credit rating to do business.

But mostly, it's just all self-defeating negative nonsense. I've basically never been salaried, I started in business with no credit rating at all (I avoided credit cards like the plague, so I got a credit rating at all relatively late in life), and I've never had to slavedrive anyone.

It's easier to blame others than to look for solutions. Probably feels better. But it's nonsense. You can build a pretty good life with some effort. Takes effort, true. But it's there if you want it.

jarin2• 15 years ago

Also, take a look at the jobs he's listed as doing. That's not the career path of someone who has any direction or ambition, it's the career path of someone who takes whatever job comes along because he's out of money and desperate.

I know, because I used to be that guy. My early career path looks like this: work at dad's restaurant, work at mom's jewelry store, temp agency, Cutco salesman, furniture assembler, temp agency, retail salesman in the mall, ear piercer, retail salesman in the mall.

Then I finally got my act together (thanks to a not-entirely-honest-but-still-greatly-appreciated recruiter) and went Navy, freelance IT, freelance programmer, salaried programmer, freelance programmer, published iOS app, entrepreneur.

lionhearted4• 15 years ago

I've been out of money and desperate at various times. It sucks. But if you point the blame only outwards, you're very likely to remain broke and desperate.

Own everything. Take all responsibility for everything that happens to you, even if it wasn't your fault. This leads to some instant satisfaction in terms of feeling more in control of your life. And long term, you do a hell of a lot better.

I try to own everything, even if it wasn't my fault. Especially if it wasn't my fault.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

"That's not the career path of someone who has any direction or ambition"

This is essentially a veiled ad-hominem attack. You don't know the author's motivations or reasons for taking these jobs. You can't a priori assume that he took these jobs because he's lazy and unmotivated.

zasz2• 15 years ago

The author does have ambition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura

He's a successful author and columnist. Hopefully, this now gives him the right to say a lot of low-paying jobs are shitty ones that barely treat you as a human being, and not everyone is able to work their way through them, despite how much fortitude they may otherwise have.

This thread is full of ridiculous ad hominems. I don't think your comment even makes any sense. So you both used to work a string of dead-end jobs. While you're willing to note that you, yourself, ended up becoming an entrepreneur, you're not willing to grant this author the same possibility that perhaps he simply started out with a poor lot in life like yourself, and ended up also working his way up.

stewbrew• 15 years ago

> He overlooks some basic things - like that you can work part time, freelance, or save up your money and then not work for a few years.

It seems the authors works as a novelist/writer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura. He probably didn't overlooked this exit strategy.

jonnathanson3• 15 years ago

Yes. It takes effort, and it also takes balls (for lack of a more gender-neutral and appropriate word).

If you want to get out of the drudgery and soul-hemorrage of the rat race, then you need to be prepared for the risk. Most people aren't. They do the mental math, figure that they need the salary or the stability or the medical coverage too much to risk it, and they take the blue pill. They resign themselves to their fates. And that's fine. It's a respectable and probably smart choice for most people, but it's a choice nonetheless. People shouldn't lose sight of that fact.

rgraham2• 15 years ago

Courage, bravery, bravado, boldness, gusto, audacity, pluck, fearlessness, risk-tolerance, temerity, tenacity, fortitude, nerve, or stoutheartedness work for you?

It is indeed a choice. The consequences of reversing that choice get much more complex as you gain responsibilities in life. Ultimately, however, your life is on you. No one else can care like you do.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

"figure that they need the salary or the stability or the medical coverage too much to risk it...it's a choice nonetheless."

You don't see the contradiction here? What if someone is ill and really needs the medical coverage? What if they have dependents?

Just because you are fortunate enough to be healthy and relatively responsibility free (if you are), doesn't mean that everyone else is in the same boat, and that people who make a different decision do so because they have infinite choice.

This is a big problem with most of the just-world arguments I see about these issues - they never acknowledge that not everything in life is a choice, no matter how much we want to make it so.

hendler• 15 years ago

The suffering is real.

I agree the tone is defeatist, but I don't blame the author or hold resentment for the expression of the suffering.

Poverty is a learned, psychological problem. Escaping the trap is possible, but not easy for most.

The disease of poverty can cured with education and liberty, many believe. Where education and liberty fail, poverty brings us all down and holds us all back from our potential.

Poverty isn't just for the poor. A significant portion of the wealthy also have a poverty of mind and perpetuate poverty by not investing in the future.

pnathan• 15 years ago

I think you are redefining poverty here.

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

For the record, this was written in 1990, when low-cost startups like web sites were pretty difficult to conceptualize. Back then, there was very little you could do, outside of generic consulting, that didn't have a huge bootstrapping cost, making credit ratings much more important as you had to get a loan or an investment to get anything done. The internet has changed much of that now.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

Exactly. Most of the respondents to this thread don't seem to realize that we occupy a very unusual and richly privileged period of history - or for that matter, a very privileged position by dint of being fortunate enough to work in an industry that does allow it's workers a very high degree of autonomy if they choose that for themselves. Even then, it's still very hard and risky work.

pygy_2• 15 years ago

You're attacking the messenger, but you fail to address his core argument which boils down to Marx's criticism of capitalism (the fact that workers don't own the production means is unfair).

"Just start your business" as a mean to all ends doesn't scale. Your last paragraph also seems to ignore that, for some people, just getting by takes (sometimes a lot of) effort. You may be clueless at some key point in your life, make a bad decision and get caught in inextricable situations.

The difference between left- and right-wing views on economy boil down IMO to ethics. Both sides agree on the fact that the world is unfair, but they differ on how to address the problem.

From the extremes, the left promotes forced altruism, which has historically been proven not to work so well; whereas the right promotes egoism (relying Adam Smith's Noodly Appendage to shelter itself from remorse), which, with the ever growing rift between the very rich and the rest of the world is currently coming to its own absurd conclusion.

lionhearted4• 15 years ago

> You're attacking the messenger, but you fail to address his core argument

I'm not attacking him. His message places a lot of blame externally. That leads to not looking for solutions and building a better life.

Marxism isn't the solution. I've been to a lot of the Marxist/ex-Marxist countries, and they're all worse off than similar neighbors who didn't endure Marxism.

But that's not the big point. The big point is that placing the blame externally kills off your ability to solve problems yourself.

moultano2• 15 years ago

I don't think you're giving this enough thought.

Some traits are an emergent property of systems, and while it's technically correct to say that this is blaming "other people," it's not a useful idea. It's like getting mad that someone lied to you, and blaming their neurons.

The system we're in has some undesirable traits, and it's useful to think about them and how they might be fixed.

Unless you're suggesting that every person on earth should be an entrepreneur to be happy, I think it's worth thinking about how to make the rest of the opportunities more hospitable to a happy life.

lionhearted4• 15 years ago

> Some traits are an emergent property of systems, and while it's technically correct to say that this is blaming "other people," it's not a useful idea.

This is exactly blaming other people, from the article -

> It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. ... In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned.

There's many ways to work full-time less than 50 weeks out of the year. Instead, the author chooses to point the blame outwards.

The whole article is heavy on that external blame. It's bad, it closes your mind off to many, many possible solutions. There's definitely lots of problems with working full time for just a paycheck, but it's unhelpful to people to wrap that in such a defeatist externally-blaming way. That kills your mind off to finding solutions.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

Good for you that you've been able to do well starting a business.

Guess what? Your personal situation is not applicable to everyone - or, for that matter, even most people.

"But working stiffs can't afford houses now, fewer communities are clean, none are safe, and your kid's prospects are worse."

"Compare this to what my employer gets: If the company is successful, he (it's usually a he) gets a standard of living beyond my wildest dreams, including what I would consider fantastic protection for his family, and a world of access that I can only pitifully mimic by changing channels on my TV."

These are legitimate observations, not mere complaining.

A1kmm• 15 years ago

I think the author intended the post to be a macroeconomic critique, with personal details given as analogies.

Macroeconomic reasoning by analogy, especially personal ones, is not very rigorous, and can sound defeatist; the same article could perhaps be more rigorously written from a more academic perspective with statistics rather than personal analogies.

However, there is a certain subset of HN who don't seem to get macroeconomics - every time anyone discusses it, people come up with microeconomic solutions that wouldn't scale.

duck• 15 years ago

This is from 1990, and from my viewpoint I think a lot has changed in the past 20+ years. Of course there are still factory jobs, but if you want freedom you can find it as long as you look to the future with open eyes.

jacoblyles• 15 years ago

It sucks to have nothing to offer an employer except fungible labor that they could get from a million other people. The author should work on that. There are 6 billion people in this world and not enough wealth to let everyone live like a king just for breathing (yet).

s_jambo• 15 years ago

Are you sure on that last point? There have been some kings with pretty low standards of living historically... :)

I think a big part of the issue is our economy isn't aimed at letting everyone live like a king for just breathing, it's aimed at maximizing how fast we can transform raw resources into things people want and maximizing how much stuff we can get people with money to want to want.

doyoulikeworms• 15 years ago

Considering "living like a king" typically means that you get what you want, I'd say that the two are the same.

The slog from subsistence to utopia is, and will be, accomplished one step at a time. Improved productivity (often achieved through the transformation of raw materials), increases output relative to effort and time spent working. The dividends paid by this improved productivity is almost always reinvested, typically by reducing effort, but maintaining (or increasing) time.

tl;dr the economy is very much aimed at letting everyone live like a king just for breathing, but breathing alone is not yet productive enough to satisfy anyone's needs.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

Interestingly enough, this is not what the author was advocating.

phamilton• 15 years ago

He paints the boss/owner as such a stress free and secure position.

The reason an owner is entitled to higher pay is that they are also entitled to no pay or negative pay.

My father in law is a partner in a law firm. For the past year he has made less money than his non-partner associates, working on half salary to compensate for a lack of revenue. The working drone is much more protected against speed bumps. A bad month generally won't result in a pay cut or layoffs for the bottom of the food chain. It does directly affect the business owners. That's the risk/reward payoff.

_delirium• 15 years ago

That's often not the case in larger businesses, though: if the business does well, the boss wins (bonuses, stock options); if it does badly, the boss also wins (eased out with a golden parachute). In that case the owner still shoulders the risk, but that owner (the stockholders) is too diffuse and hands-off to really be functioning as a boss, so the company is de-facto run by an executive management that gets a lot of pay while not shouldering much risk.

I can see people getting a stuck-in-a-machine-with-a-stacked-deck feeling at a lot of large companies, because many sort of are giant, dysfunctional, bureaucratic machines. Coupled to that, many people see working for a large corporation as their only practical option.

edw519• 15 years ago

Prime quote from the other side, "Someone is Stealing My Money":

"I pay you to work 8 hours and you're on Hacker News for 6 of them. Close that browser and get back to work."

georgieporgie5• 15 years ago

I've never understood how wasting time on the job can possibly be termed 'theft'. It's irresponsible and a failure to fulfill expectations, but it's not theft.

(btw, I also don't see employers as stealing life from employees)

tomrod5• 15 years ago

Theft of labor resources, if you're salary non-exempt and reading HN is not in your job description :-)

gills• 15 years ago

Accepting payment for services which you purport to have rendered but in reality have not.

I would use 'fraud' instead of 'theft', though in reality it's close enough.

charleso• 15 years ago

I was curious what the author had gotten up to since that piece was written 20-odd years ago. This appears to be the gent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ventura

Flashtastic personal site, here:

http://michaelventura.org/

mcantor• 15 years ago

This was a work of art, man. Dig it. Yeah, mannnn. The MAN is stealing our MOJO, mannnn. Oppressing our SOULS. You gotta fight the man, man. The establishment. Big Daddy Warbucks and Uncle Sam, they're in cahoots. Fucking vampires is what they are, man. Gonna suck out our spirits through our paychecks. You dig?

Zeuf• 15 years ago

Smell likes communism for me.

nhangen4• 15 years ago

How about redirecting the argument to state:

"You are giving your life away"

If you change it that way, then I agree 100%.

This line:

"Do you expect us to be forever passive while you get rich stealing our lives?"

Really bothered me. There's nothing wrong with getting rich, and there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for. Instead of placing the blame on someone else, perhaps people like this should look inward.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

" there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for"

This is where people miss something important, in my opinion. On the surface there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for. But when you dig a little deeper, "what they're willing to work for" is really just a proxy for market forces and labor supply and demand. Just because someone accepts working for a certain price doesn't mean it's what they wanted. If they enjoy putting food on the table, they have surprisingly little choice.

nhangen4• 15 years ago

Sure, that's true, but if the market doesn't pay you what you feel you are worth, then you have the option to build something that does pay you what you are worth. It's not up to me, as a boss, to take care of someone.

exit2• 15 years ago

why was foljs comment killed at 2 points? looks like how he characterizes hn is true:

2 points by foljs 52 minutes ago | link [dead]

HN is not really a good place to post this.

Here the audience is mostly aspiring "entrepreneurs" dreaming of making it big, so they are tied to the rat race and take all the "american dream" BS to heart.

Apart from a statistical insignificant minority that will "make it", the majority can always come back to it in 10-20 years, when they are bitter and wised enough. -----

tomrod5• 15 years ago

A few points:

HN is not amero-centric

"The American Dream BS" is not correctly stated in the original piece, thus cannot be the "BS" cannot be what HN folks want to follow

* Anyone can make it if they choose to. Not everyone succeeds on the first try, but the odds are with the person who chooses to learn from mistakes and try better the next time.

* Success is ill-defined when one makes money and prestige the only inputs. As an example of what one small subset of the world thinks, view the third quotation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O._McKay#Quotations

kbutler• 15 years ago

tl;dr I'm a victim, so you are too.

rwl• 15 years ago

The upshot of this piece is much more significant than the comments here have been willing to admit. Yes, you can write the author off as having a whiny, blame-others attitude. Yes, you can say that if he would just take matters into his own hands, the path of entrepreneurship is hard but ultimately rewarding. And maybe that's right.

But if you say that, then you have already accepted a premise that the piece is calling into question, namely: why should that be the choice that everyone faces? Why should the only options be self-sacrifice to the drudgery of the rat race for the sake of security, or a different kind of self-sacrifice for a different reward, that of "independence"? Why should we structure our society so that, for the average person, self-sacrifice is the only way to survive, much less get ahead?

To say that there's a better way, but that the better way involves social changes that a single person can't simply choose to make for herself, is not just to whine and blame others. It's a reasonable criticism of our economic, social and political institutions -- one worthy of debate, no doubt, but not worthy of dismissal.

pdx• 15 years ago

     Why should we structure our society so that, for the 
     average person, self-sacrifice is the only way to 
     survive, much less get ahead?

So, we should structure our society so that you can get ahead without sacrifice? Do you get to be ahead of me or do I get to be ahead of you? I just want to be clear which of us gets ahead of the other one, what with neither one of us sacrificing anything.

georgieporgie5• 15 years ago

Do you get to be ahead of me or do I get to be ahead of you?

You could get ahead of where you were last year.

steveklabnik6• 15 years ago

You could both move forward together, rather than ensuring that someone is always ahead and another is farther behind...

A rising tide lifts all boats.

rick88813• 15 years ago

"But if you say that, then you have already accepted a premise that the piece is calling into question, namely: why should that be the choice that everyone faces?"

Do you have an alternative? Humans have tried many different methods over many thousands of years and our current system is the result of trying and failing many, many times. It's the most fair and allows pretty much anyone to be successful.

Life is difficult because we have more freedoms. We don't have someone making all of the decisions for us (which might be easier), but the result is more choice. If you don't make the right choices, you could end up living on the street or in poverty. Buy you could also end up with lots of money and a nice life.

I suppose an alternative would be no choice. You are forced to work for the government.

georgieporgie5• 15 years ago

Do you have an alternative?

I'm not the parent poster, but I suggest that co-ops have led to greater employee satisfaction. There are also non-co-op companies where employees all have a say in business decisions, and they have done well and have great employee satisfaction and retention.

The current (big) business climate dictates that the sole purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value at all times, at all costs. I suggest that the purpose of a company is to provide value to all stakeholders, and find a healthy balance.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

"It's the most fair and allows pretty much anyone to be successful."

These are highly debatable points.

rbarooah5• 15 years ago

I'd like to see a list of these 'many' different systems that have been tried.

It seems to me as though we've tried 'kings/dictators' lots of times, and we've watched communism devolve into 'kings/dictators', and we may very well be in the process of watching capitalism devolve into 'kings/dictators' as wealth and political power seem to being concentrated more and more in the hands of a small group.

I personally agree that blaming others doesn't help. Each individual makes their own decision in the end.

Except that most people are forced to go through more than a decade of training to accept employment by others and do as they are told. That puts people at a disadvantage when it comes to learning how to act independently.

The solution may be for each person to make their own choices, but it doesn't help to pretend that there are no forces working against that.

rgraham2• 15 years ago

"But if you say that, then you have already accepted a premise that the piece is calling into question, namely: why should that be the choice that everyone faces? Why should the only options be self-sacrifice"

It seems to me that this line of thinking is ultimately just asking for the removal of choice entirely. If you 'get ahead' without any self-sacrifice then you either managed this solely through an act of wishing or entirely on the backs of others. Is a world without choice preferable? Is it meaningful to ask the question when reality is clearly otherwise?

astrofinch2• 15 years ago

Self-sacrifice isn't the only way to survive. It's just the only way to achieve the median modern standard of living. If you're happy with a lower standard of living it's not hard to survive without working.

http://www.couchsurfing.org/

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/frzzq/iama_prolific_du...

Tichy3• 15 years ago

I don't think couchsurfing and dumpster diving would scale to the masses.

ajju2• 15 years ago

" And to compete in the business community, you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with. Pay them as little as they'll tolerate and give them no say in anything, because that's what's most efficient and profitable. Money is the absolute standard. Freedom, and the dignity and well-being of one's fellow creatures, simply don't figure in the basic formula."

This is patently untrue based on my own personal experience but forget me, to just cite two of the many famous examples that immediately come to mind:

1) Zappos gives their employees complete freedom in how to do their job and has succeeded wildly.

2) Google pays their employees quite a bit in salary and perks and is one of the most successful companies in the world.

The whole piece is full of claims that are provably false and claims about how it is impossible to fix it. Sure, many companies treat their employees like cogs in a machine. I worked for one. Then I started my own company to do things differently and I was able to. It wasn't easy but compared to anywhere else in the space-time continuum I feel like we, in 2011 in the United States, are in one of the best environments for entrepreneurship.

rbarooah5• 15 years ago

Are you seriously arguing that Google and Zappos are representative of many companies?

ajju2• 15 years ago

They are examples that it can be done. The entire tone of the article is defeatist with the author arguing that it cannot be done.

For example: "you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with"

No. You won't find yourself having to do anything like that. There are well known companies that don't do that and make tonnes of money. That is what I am arguing.

Just noticed (1990) in the title. I am not sure it was there before. Either the title was updated or I missed it. In any case, the article makes more sense if you take that into account.

rick88813• 15 years ago

A business can take years to become successful, which many times means either not having a regular salary, sacrificing free-time with friends and family, and working harder than you ever would at any job. Even if it meant employees got a cut of the profits, unions and laws would prevent companies from being run like this.

It sounds like this guy expects a cut of the profits for just working, which will never happen (unless you are the government).

He doesn't like working for anyone, yet he does nothing to actually change his situation except blame anyone and everyone for his problems. He reminds me of the person that says that wealth and becoming rich is 'just luck'.

tomrod5• 15 years ago

As with other comments, I agree the tone is self-defeating.

When did we forget the difference between problems and conditions? Problems are things with solutions within our power. Conditions are things without solutions within our power.

I feel the author could benefit greatly by learning how to determine what could be solved with one's own effort--and an employer stealing life away is solvable, IMHO, in numerous ways.

tomrod5• 15 years ago

Also, this piece could be an argument for automation. If the employer is stealing your life, would you not be happier having a machine do your job, giving you the freedom to live your life?

rbarooah5• 15 years ago

How can that be arranged?

takameyer• 15 years ago

I work the office cubicle software job, but this doesn't bring me down too much. At times the mindset the author describes can creep up, but I can deal with it by realizing that everyday I'm getting better and better at what I do. Being an embedded developer, having access to tools that I otherwise could not afford is a great perk at my job. Knowledge of how to use them could only come from a university, a company or falling into a large sum of money. Granted the bureaucratic office politics exists, but I feel it's not as bad as it could be. I have the freedom to solve problems using the tools I desire. We use Linux for our micro operating system, so I'm gaining valuable command line skills and script-fu. My only complaint is my current salary. But the freedom and encouragement to continue learning is worth more to me than the money anyway.

watchandwait• 15 years ago

The real theft is that the federal, state, and local governments take about 40 percent of your earnings in an array of taxes.

dreyfiz• 15 years ago

What percentage of your earnings would you not consider theft?

mortehu• 15 years ago

In my opinion, taxing some fraction of people's income is the best solution to the problem he's mentioning. Although I am under the impression that USA is rather reluctant to tax high earners.

rick88813• 15 years ago

well, your impression is wrong. High earners get federal, state, and locally taxed.

dstein• 15 years ago

I wonder what this fellow would have thought about work 100 years ago or more. The amount of "slavery" that a person has to do today to sustain himself has never, in the history of mankind, ever been lower than it is today. We should be so lucky.

alexblack2• 15 years ago

I think the title of that article should be "I'm giving my life to my employer"

alexblack2• 15 years ago

The article starts off well, but ends with the wrong conclusion :)

A better conclusion would be: "I'm giving my life to my employer, I don't like that, I better change something in my life."

tscrib• 15 years ago

The article properly points out that a company cannot do its business without employees. Certainly: employees have the skill to actually perform the tasks the company was founded upon to provide. What the article fails to recognize the power in that relationship. As much as employees rely on companies for employment, the company relies on skilled workers and low turn-around for continuity and to keep costs low. Re-training and the administration of recruiting/hiring new employees are huge expenses. In my experience, you (as an employee) weild immense power. By having options on the table (other employment choices, or even offers), one can easily negotiate for higher wage/more vacation/etc.

EvanK• 15 years ago

It all depends on how you view your life. You will spend the majority of your life trying to simply survive the coming day/week/month/year. How you do so is what determines what kind of life you lead.

Work has never been my purpose in life so much as a means to an end. I've never been a "drone" so much as a wanderer that has stopped to warm his hands by the fire of a camp. If/when I don't like what I do anymore, I will simply cease to do it and wander on to the next thing. There is always a way to survive, though it may not always be obvious (and sometimes may not even be legal.)

At some point, many people find a person or group of people that they decide to center their life around, and put down lasting ties, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But that kind of life does require more planning and forethought, and often a lot more concessions to their own personal wants and needs. If you're fine with that and what you get in return (family and friends), then you never become a drone. If you're not fine with that, then you have to decide what it is that you DO want, and go after it.

istari• 15 years ago

I walk into a restaurant. They charge me $10 for a meal. Yet they only paid $2 for the ingredients!

Now I don't know a lot of math, but even I know that 2 goes into 10... FIVE times! They are charging me FIVE times what it cost them to make that meal!

Sure, they came up with the money to open the restaurant, and the time to make the meal, but does that give them the right to rip me off? Because I spent my life earn my money, and by stealing my money THEY ARE STEALING MY LIFE!

Now you could say that I could always go and open my own restaurant, but that would require credit which THEY wouldn't give me, and ripping off other people, which I refuse to do.

Cooking? What's cooking? Never heard of it.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

False analogy. You can choose not to go to a restaurant if you don't want to pay the markup. You cannot choose not to work if you enjoy not starving.

JonnieCache2• 15 years ago

Yes you can. You just have to adjust your expectations.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Freeganism

Note: these ideas do not necessarily reflect the views of the management

jterce2• 15 years ago

Not at all. The analogy was completed with the reference to cooking at the end. If you are not willing to cook for yourself and have no one to cook for you, you cannot avoid going to a restaurant. You'll die of starvation! If, however, you are willing to cook for yourself, as with work, your options are nearly limitless.

Tichy3• 15 years ago

The only interesting question is if it really is the case that if you are a have-not, you never have a chance of starting a successful business.

Of course we know that it is possible to start out with little (YC is the living proof of that), but that might only be exceptions to the rule. I am not yet sure that our society really is not skewed. Or at least there might not be a universal law protecting the chances for the "small people". It seems possible that in a few years time, Apple Facebook and Google control the internet and again the options of the small people will be reduced to low-margin sharecropping.

Atm I am leaning to the belief that chances are good enough. If that is the case, the only sensible estimate for the fair price of work seems to be market value. I have yet to see another definition of fair that works. So if the employers can get away with paying their employees little money, it must be because the market does not afford more. There might be millions of jobless waiting to take over their jobs, for example - what would the jobless think about the fair price for a job?

Then again, politics define at least some of the rules of the market (as an extreme example, government could decree a maximum wage) . But if the author thinks the market is broken, he should say so, and state in what way it is broken and how it could possibly be fixed. Just calling somebody a thief doesn't accomplish anything.

zooey• 15 years ago

I think you have some problem connecting with his view of the society how-it-should-be. You move in a given universe and you accept the rules: you by the way want to use that rules and accept the consequences on society and mankind of those rules. He think differently. He, among many others, think rules are wrong and the outcome is a wrong society.

Dismissing what he says is dismissing philosophy or sociology, disciplines that for their very nature do not accept the status quo and want to test the rules our world is based on.

By the way, after reading some of his writing, I can say that he writes really damn well.

meric• 15 years ago

You might be interested in this book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)

bobbin• 15 years ago

> I came to a conclusion that for me was fundamental: My employwers are stealing my life.

There is no theft, just voluntary trade. He exchanges his time and effort for a pay check and then blames his employer for the deal he accepted.

seamlessvision• 15 years ago

This sounds like the whiny rant of a child. It's not just about money, it's about drive and vision. If you have drive and vision, then your employer will notice and you'll move up, learn more, maybe even make enough to start your own business with your own ideas. If not, if you don't choose to better yourself and fight for what you want, then you fit the position you allow yourself to fit. You wouldn't ask a janitor to make business decisions, why would you ask an accountant, or a programmer, or a designer?

Life is about taking pride in what you do and going after what you want, not about whining, me me me.

swift4• 15 years ago

Sure, you wouldn't necessarily ask a janitor or a programmer to make business decisions; the constraints of mortality force us to specialize in life. Nevertheless, do you really believe that one speciality - business - is so much more important than all the rest that it deserves to extract a disproportionate share of the profit from almost every enterprise? That doesn't seem self-evident to me.

grammaton30• 15 years ago

" If you have drive and vision, then your employer will notice and you'll move up"

It pains me to say this, but this sentiment strikes me as seriously naive. Plenty of people work like animals, are driven like crazy, and have "vision." And for quite a few of them, their employer could give two craps.

onan_barbarian3• 15 years ago

It's too bad that no-one thought of all these sentiments before 1990, forcing this guy to break so much bold new ground in the critique of capitalism.

Some people are ragging on him here for being lazy in his career; I'm going to call him on being unbelievably lazy in running this whole spiel as if he just thought of all these ideas himself.

There isn't the slightest acknowledgement that there's huge branches of modern thought that deal with this very problem using countless different approaches and reaching countless different conclusions. This isn't to say that all that thought is useful or contains a helpful path to reform, but ignoring it completely is just dumb.

He's either atrociously undereducated or extremely disingenuous, take your pick.

-10 more points for talking about everything as if it's specific to America and the particular timeframe.

steveklabnik6• 15 years ago

It is possible for people to invent ideas independently. Also, maybe he just hasn't read Marx.

Furthermore, maybe he does, but I wouldn't call him 'lazy' for not providing some sort of citation: there's enough cultural baggage associated with Marx that as soon as you say that word, a certain portion of your audience's brains turn off.

Better to be 'lazy' and possibly reach some of those people than not.

onan_barbarian3• 15 years ago

Right. He hasn't read Marx. Or any other critique of capitalism, European or homegrown, for the past 100 years. Or any fiction that is informed, in whole or in part, by this critique. No, he didn't invent this 'independently'.

What's the point of 'reaching' people if you've got so little new to say? Its not a matter of 'citation', it's a matter of acknowledging that there are a host of proposed solutions (and critiques of critiques, and so on) out there. By pretending that none of it exists, you wind up with a tl;dr column that says what's been said before.

His contribution is in fact a subtraction from the sum total of human knowledge, in that the only thing original about it is wrong - the notion that the phenomenon that he talks about has something specifically to do with America between 1950-1990.

Someone is stealing your life (1990)

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