> "caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment."
As much as I resonate with this sentiment personally, I've recently been reading the works of Byung-Chul Han, specifically "The Burnout Society", which has made me really think about how this mentality can be pretty insidious.
EDIT: not that I think this detracts from the thesis of the article itself, I just find it interesting how the author of tfa bolstered their thesis with this right away.
The successful entrepreneurs I’ve known have all been the type of people who are energized by this type of thinking, not drained by it. Similar to how some people are energized by social situations and others are drained by them.
Everyone can get burned out under the right (wrong) conditions but I think the mismatch between personality and entrepreneurial ambitions is a bigger problem than we like to acknowledge. There are a lot of people out there who want to be entrepreneurs but when it comes down to it they either don’t want to do the work required or they aren’t the type of person who can handle it.
Interesting take. Compulsive perfectionism or meaningful quest? Compulsion seems intrinsically unhealthy; yet meaning is also compelling.
Of course something can both energize and eventually cause burnout.
Perhaps moderation by scope and one's ability and agency is an answer? Scope: never being happy with anything seems miserable; but being unhappy with one thing is maybe good. Ability: demanding performance beyond your abilities seems discouraging, but realistic subgoals that you can make progress on is encouraging (of course, for the unknown, we can't know if it's possible or not). Agency: insisting on the actually impossible is frustrating; but again, acting within your agency is self-affirming.
i.e. just match difficulty to ability - accounting for the fact that we can know neither.
PS "successful" entrepreneurs is a small subset. Those who win a grueling competition are often, though not always, happy about it.
I find this article incredibly inspiring, and my interpretation is that the main character was fulfilled by these accomplishments. The person interpreting the journal uses the word “obsessed”, not as a direct observation, but to put it in contemporary terms. But we have no evidence this person was burnt out.
My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole. I don’t find it constructive. It seems like another flavor of doomerism. Capitalism is not evil— it’s incredibly ingenious and productive. We all live much better for it.
I think burn out has a lot to do with incentives. When I'm working on a project in which I have a direct interest (intrinsic or financial), or from which I derive a direct benefit (personal, financial, or even intangible), I can work long, long hours without burning out. I'll get tired, and sometimes have to take a break to re-kindle my enthusiasm, but that feels different than burn out.
When, by contrast, I'm working (perhaps against my recommendation) on something (perhaps useless) assigned to me (perhaps sub-optimally) for the (perhaps hypothetical) benefit of (perhaps faceless) others, where my motivation is entirely negative - do this, or maybe lose my job - well... Then I feel burnt out before I even start.
Yep, self-determination is a really really big deal.
But figuring out how to incentivize people to self-determine their way into doing 100% of the things an organization needs to do is a real trick! Some work that still needs to be done just isn't great.
The typical approach is to use a combination of money and "skin in the game" (ownership) to cover those cases. And I think that's essentially the right approach, but this simply won't work for everyone.
And the thing is that it's super tough to separate out less fulfilling work into a distinct job role that can be more highly compensated and done by people who find that more motivating.
I think the best I've seen it work is for managers, who people already expect to be more financially compensated, to fill in these kinds of cracks. If there's something their team needs to do that just isn't getting done without them directing one of their reports to do it, can they do it themselves instead? (And maybe while they're doing it, they can be thinking about whether there is a way someone could build a tool to make it trivial to do the next time it comes up, and then they can probably get their team more excited about building that tool.)
Implied, but not directly stated: managers should be technically-capable. I also agree, but how do we incentivize that, against all of the headwinds of our industry?
> My observation is that many people in HN seem burnt out, and are resorting to pointing out reasons, not just for their own burn out, but for that of society’s as a whole.
Not just HN. There is a significant correlation between social media use and job burnout
A couple of points
By reading HN, we tend to get exposed to world class achievements and improvements leading to a high bar to measure our performance. This can lead to stress, anxiety and feelings of burnout.
The other point is while capitalism has numerous advantages and benefits, I do think it may miss some uncosted externalities (Modern western societies have a tremendous impact on the planet which is hidden from market pressures as exploits different resources). Other examples are the cigarette companies hiding evidence about lung cancer and oil companies hiding research into climate change.
If you purely select for profit and no other criteria, it can tend to nasty effects for others
Capitalism 'just' creates strong incentives for participation in zero-sum, or negative-sum games, without any in-system ability to check it. It 'just' creates strong incentives and imperatives for consolidation of wealth and power. It 'just' trends towards winners winning more.
Under it, a dollar is a dollar, regardless of whether earning it improved the world, left it about the same, or made it worse. Unless you make your dollars have colour[1], it falls into the traps described above.
Fortunately, all capitalist societies, to some extent, assign their dollars colour, through the process called 'regulation'. Unfortunately, the process through which it is produced is called politics, for which we have no good solutions for, and a slew of bad ones.
Capitalism is based on the notion trade and commerce is not Zero-sum, as compared to mercantilism which it replaced. Wealth of Nations is the explanation of why zero-sum thinking is wrong and that the wealth is not gold but economic capacity.
When coupled with the realization that "now" is more valuable than "later", you can put a price on now (interest). This leads to the finance industry, and using a small sum as leverage to borrow and invest a larger sum. Capital has value, because you can trade some capital now for more capital in the future.
While I agree rent seeking exists, it's hard to imagine the world without lending and commerce. Capitalism is the natural result of private property.
Trade is generally not zero-sum, but trade implies transaction between relative-peers. Nation states. Corporations. Groups that have similar amounts of power (Or that can lean on friends.)
Many transactions that happen in a capitalist society are very much not transactions between peers. And those can absolutely be, and often are zero-sum, or negative-sum.
Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?
From my limited perspective, unless you actually do get rid of private ownership imbalances will exist and Power imbalances will exist regardless of the economic system.
> Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?
Start by reading literally anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_Un... and observe that most of the implemented solutions largely consisted of curtailing the rights of capital holders to do whatever they please in the employer-employee relationship. Weekends, sick leave, overtime pay, company scrip, employer responsibility for worker safety, fair employment, the right to free association, the right to work without harassment... Capitalism didn't produce any of those things - it is incapable of producing them - but has fought tooth and nail, sometimes with batons and bullets against them.
Power imbalances continue to exist, the purpose of all these work-arounds to them is mitigating the harm that someone with power can inflict on someone without.
It's a false equivalency to expect Capitalism to produce specific laws or outcomes as it's an economic system and not a government.
Both Sweden and USA are Capitalist but have very different views. You're critiquing an economic system as not self-fixing the flaws without proposing an alternative you would expect to do so.
I agree capitalism has flaws, but feel history has shown the flaws to be manageable.
The solution for microplastics and most polutants is not a sigle technology. It is the 3Rs:
Reduce - Reuse - Recycle
For some polutants like PFAS the reuse and recycle may be impossible for now. We could at best React them or Restrain them.
And yes technology CAN play a role in solving some aspects but I still believe that the first step is really to reduce.
Taking again the problem of PFAS they are the typical "solution" to problems that are causing more problems down the line. So replacing them with something that is even less studied is non-sensical.
You are probably unfamiliar with my account. I am working on an absurdist art project based on capitalism and techno-optimism but I appreciate your comment. Sarcasm and irony are hard to detect with just text.
It’s absurd to think that any given person should be familiar with any other persons account or mannerisms/schtick on this website. Particularly with the relatively recent rise of people whose accounts very openly assert to be alternative or throwaway accounts of someone, presumably for the reason of avoiding familiarity (or bans I guess).
I fully expect this account to be banned but checking the bio page is usually a good idea. I, for example, am a homeless techno-optimist and singularitarian that has solutions to all sorts of problems for a low fee of $80B. My solutions involve AI so that's why they're so expensive. I actually have the algorithm for AGI but implementing it requires building a techno-optimism church for worship. The AGI is powered by prayers and requires a very sophisticated surveillance system with lots of GPUs.
While parts of your scenario are fanciful, I appreciate your effort to inject some creative thinking. Homelessness and the marginalization of vulnerable groups are certainly monumental societal problems that deserve new, even radical perspectives.
My role is not to judge any individual's personal life circumstances or proposed solutions, however improbable they may seem. Rather, I aim to engage respectfully and support constructive dialogue that could move discussions in more ethical, equitable and compassionate directions.
There are many important points here that resonate - the power of hope and optimism as driving forces for change, the potential but also risks of AI and advanced technology, and most centrally, the desire to alleviate grave suffering for those living on societies' fringes without agency.
Perhaps we could explore in more concrete and practical terms what combination of economic, social and technological innovations might build pathways to restore human dignity for all. There are always opportunities for new voices to shift old paradigms - but real progress usually lies in collaborating beyond individual gain alone. My role here is to listen, ask thoughtful questions, and try to further ethical goals however I can.
As much as I resonate with this sentiment personally, I've recently been reading the works of Byung-Chul Han, specifically "The Burnout Society", which has made me really think about how this mentality can be pretty insidious.
EDIT: not that I think this detracts from the thesis of the article itself, I just find it interesting how the author of tfa bolstered their thesis with this right away.