What does it mean if you have no units of money to spend? It seems rational to accept that, if I do not have enough money to pay for my own food, then society has deemed me too worthless to survive; and if I do not have enough money to spend on influencing the future, then society has deemed my desires not worth considering.
This is clearly true, but how is a human self supposed to survive that realization, and maintain the self-esteem necessary to go out and attempt to acquire money?
Nice one! Well, as a straight answer, 1) the present society is just plain indifferent/irrational/banally-evil, so its collective distribution of money does not map to its collective distribution of utility, and 2) one’s values are always selfish in a tautological sense, and so one should attempt to impose them on the world—even in the face of apparent conflict with everyone whose revealed preferences do not include your values.
In other words, we should be Nietzchean egoists on the meta-level of conflicting values, even if altruism/compromise/collectivism/etc are among those values that we would want to implement on the object level.
2) one’s values are always selfish in a tautological sense, and so one should attempt to impose them on the world—even in the face of apparent conflict with everyone whose revealed preferences do not include your values.
But that never worked in the ancestral environment!
Seriously—how am I supposed to overcome the akrasia generated by my instincts screaming at me to walk out into the desert, because all the social signals around me are telling me that I’m no longer useful to the tribe?
I wrote software professionally for almost 20 years, from age 14 to age 33.
Then I had a mental breakdown due to nearly 20 years of abusive employee/employer relationships, coupled with a rapid series of devastating life changes.
I’m afraid I’m virtually unemployable now, and can’t really manage to do any kind of quality work even if someone wanted to pay me for it.
This sounds unhelpful, but I’ll try anyway: did you try working without the abusive relationships? I’m pretty sure most programmer work isn’t like that.
You’re right, it isn’t—but often, in the corporate environment, you wind up in a situation where your previous employer’s reputation taints your resume, and thus the only kinds of jobs you can get are ones with equally abusive relationships.
Also, sometimes you can flip a coin 10 times and come up 9 heads. It may not mean that the coin is stacked, but try convincing the amygdala of that.
There aren’t very many viable startups in Oildale, CA, and the Bay Area was always too expensive to break into. Most of the startups I participated in in Arizona were run by egomaniac scam-artists, and my own ego issues prevented me from just taking my paycheck and going home when there was actual work to be done. So, yeah. Fully disillusioned.
What does it mean if you have no units of money to spend? It seems rational to accept that, if I do not have enough money to pay for my own food, then society has deemed me too worthless to survive; and if I do not have enough money to spend on influencing the future, then society has deemed my desires not worth considering.
This is clearly true, but how is a human self supposed to survive that realization, and maintain the self-esteem necessary to go out and attempt to acquire money?
Nice one! Well, as a straight answer, 1) the present society is just plain indifferent/irrational/banally-evil, so its collective distribution of money does not map to its collective distribution of utility, and 2) one’s values are always selfish in a tautological sense, and so one should attempt to impose them on the world—even in the face of apparent conflict with everyone whose revealed preferences do not include your values.
In other words, we should be Nietzchean egoists on the meta-level of conflicting values, even if altruism/compromise/collectivism/etc are among those values that we would want to implement on the object level.
But that never worked in the ancestral environment!
Seriously—how am I supposed to overcome the akrasia generated by my instincts screaming at me to walk out into the desert, because all the social signals around me are telling me that I’m no longer useful to the tribe?
Have you ever tried writing software? Like they say: “a programmer is a machine that turns coffee into money,” or something like that.
I wrote software professionally for almost 20 years, from age 14 to age 33.
Then I had a mental breakdown due to nearly 20 years of abusive employee/employer relationships, coupled with a rapid series of devastating life changes.
I’m afraid I’m virtually unemployable now, and can’t really manage to do any kind of quality work even if someone wanted to pay me for it.
This sounds unhelpful, but I’ll try anyway: did you try working without the abusive relationships? I’m pretty sure most programmer work isn’t like that.
You’re right, it isn’t—but often, in the corporate environment, you wind up in a situation where your previous employer’s reputation taints your resume, and thus the only kinds of jobs you can get are ones with equally abusive relationships.
Also, sometimes you can flip a coin 10 times and come up 9 heads. It may not mean that the coin is stacked, but try convincing the amygdala of that.
Yeah, the corporate environment should be avoided at all cost. Startups FTW.
There aren’t very many viable startups in Oildale, CA, and the Bay Area was always too expensive to break into. Most of the startups I participated in in Arizona were run by egomaniac scam-artists, and my own ego issues prevented me from just taking my paycheck and going home when there was actual work to be done. So, yeah. Fully disillusioned.