Success in existing systems tends to give you a big salary, which can be cut off if you step out of line, making you dependent.
Sometimes there’s a preference, or outright requirement, for candidates to be in a lot of debt, sometimes combined with the high salary. (Or the company is somewhere with a very high cost of living, which gwern dubbed “golden handcuffs”.*)
These existing systems will tend to have norms (implicit and explicit) which maintain the status quo. Putting up an extraordinary effort will tend to disrupt these norms. Furthermore, it won’t usually be rewarded proportionately to the risks; you basically get your salary one way or the other. (This is of course not 100% true, but you get the point.)
Lazy workers don’t like hard workers, because they make them have to work harder.
*After checking the source, I found he also highlighted the cost of healthcare, and student debt. This seems far more pervasive.
Yeah. I wanted to say that big salary can actually make you independent if you save and invest. But there will be a social pressure to not do this; sometimes a hard requirement.
(There seems to be some similarity between “as an employee, you can often spend half of your working time browsing web or socializing with your colleagues, but you are not allowed to leave work one hour earlier” and “as a well-paid employee, you are socially allowed to spend your extra money on expensive clothes, expensive cars, sometimes even blackjack and hookers, but saving the money and trying to retire early will be frowned upon”. Something like: we are giving you some perks, under condition that you will not optimize against our intended goals. We’d prefer to give you $2000 to waste and become more dependent, rather than $1000 to save and become less dependent. Or am I just imagining things?)
Sometimes there’s a preference, or outright requirement, for candidates to be in a lot of debt, sometimes combined with the high salary. (Or the company is somewhere with a very high cost of living, which gwern dubbed “golden handcuffs”.*)
Lazy workers don’t like hard workers, because they make them have to work harder.
*After checking the source, I found he also highlighted the cost of healthcare, and student debt. This seems far more pervasive.
Yeah. I wanted to say that big salary can actually make you independent if you save and invest. But there will be a social pressure to not do this; sometimes a hard requirement.
(There seems to be some similarity between “as an employee, you can often spend half of your working time browsing web or socializing with your colleagues, but you are not allowed to leave work one hour earlier” and “as a well-paid employee, you are socially allowed to spend your extra money on expensive clothes, expensive cars, sometimes even blackjack and hookers, but saving the money and trying to retire early will be frowned upon”. Something like: we are giving you some perks, under condition that you will not optimize against our intended goals. We’d prefer to give you $2000 to waste and become more dependent, rather than $1000 to save and become less dependent. Or am I just imagining things?)
When an artist strikes it rich, it is the art dealer’s job to teach expensive habits.