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In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.

You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.

Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

> but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

It's common in some tech and upper middle class bubbles, but outside of some startups and a few VHCOL cities most of the 40+ people in tech I encounter have families.

I think the mindset is most popular in internet bubbles like Reddit. Reddit went mainstream a decade ago and many people in their 30s and 40s grew up reading a lot of Reddit. Reddit cleaned up their popular subreddits list years ago, but for a while subreddits like r/childfree were constantly in everyone's default feeds. Redditors would talk about people who had kids as "breeders" as a derogatory term and treat them like they'd made terrible decisions with their lives.

I didn't realize how much this carried over into the real world until my friends and I started having kids. I knew a few people who treated our decisions like we were making terrible mistakes and throwing our lives away. I still encounter people from younger generations who are confused when I say that I like spending time with my kids. They can't imagine how that would be enjoyable in any way. When you grow up with your chosen social media telling you that the smart people are maximizing their bank accounts, minimizing their responsibilities, and doing as little as possible to get there, they can't fathom how someone could be happy with kids.

I don't understand why people, generally on both sides of the issue, just ignore the social effects of it and instead just focus on the personal. I suspect most don't intuit how rapidly fertility shifts population sizes, because it's an exponential. A fertility rate of 1 means each generation decreases by more than 50%, compounding. So after just 5 generations and your generational size is down 97% with your population doing the exact same, staggered out by a few decades.

And fertility determines not only the size of a population, but even the age ratios within that population. Low fertility means you end up with far more elderly than you do working age. Far from this vision of being a society with more for everybody, we'll be creating societies where labor is ever-more scarce, economies are primarily dedicated to helping sustain the elderly and simultaneously collapsing at the same time. It's not going to be pretty.

For these reasons, and many others, I think the social aspect is one of the most important. Self fulfillment and these other things are very important and good, but if we don't have children then we're going to be creating some pretty messed up societies for our descendants. We're likely going to get to see this play out in South Korea during our lifetimes. And I do wonder what their descendants will think of the South Koreans of today.

I find the polarization of the child/no-child discussion revolting. One side poo-poo:ing on the other, have a child? Breeder! The other poo-poo:ing back... no child, you f*cking egoist, I'm happy your gene line dies out.

Personally I am of the opinion that everyone is entitled to their own life, and that the default assumption should be that they make conscious decisions in line with their own preferences.

Have a child? Great, but don't complain to me about early mornings and stress... you knew that before you had one. No child? Go for it! But don't complain to me about loneliness and lack of purpose.

I'm leaning towards the no child camp myself. I love my long morning, and complete lack of some little createurs (rightful) demand on my time. Yes, I won't have the pleasure of seeing that little creature grow up, and I might have a lonelier old age (but there's plenty of social settings I can inject myself into), but that's life. There's advantages and disadvantages to everything.

The trick is to find out which ones you like more.

It strikes me that both these views are selfish, in that they focus on direct impact on one's life. But what about the broad impact on society for the descendants? What if by abdicating procreation we create conditions where only communities that force childbearing survive? Ought we not figure out a system where we can have both freedom and equality, as well as a sustainable population?

Same. My wife and I very much enjoy being child-free in our late-30s, but we avoided joining child-free groups to avoid the "parents are breeders" crowd.

Agreed except people encounter loneliness and lack of purpose for reasons besides choosing not to have kids and doing so is absolutely not guaranteed to resolve those feelings - you can build community, engage in service, etc

I am about to hit 40 soon and have an alternative take on all that. I agree reddit was and still is a very toxic echo chamber, but the rest of us who have avoided having kids shouldn't be lumped in with those people.

I came from a big family and grew up somewhat poor watching remorseful adults who didn't recognize the gravity of bringing a life into this world, let alone several, basically drink themselves to death to cope.

My social life is mostly offline and I enjoy helping people in any way I can, but I am fully aware of my own flaws. I find balance by being generous in what seems like a million other ways I might not have the energy or time for if I had a family. To each their own.

You seem to be polarising the choices. You do not have to have a big family or no kids at all. I have two kids.

For the vast majority people nothing else they can do with their lives will be anywhere near as fulfilling as having children. There are exceptions, of course, but it takes something like an unusual personality, or a great commitment to something else (e.g. celibacy in religious orders etc.), or something else really fulfilling.

I strongly suspect that someone who has the sense of responsibility that you have about children would make a great parent and not do what you grew up with.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be polarizing. I'm trying to emphasize what I've learned at the extremes. That can inform a choice much more clearly.

The outcomes of the children are directly correlated with the quality of the relationship the parents have. No relationship I've ever seen, then or now, seems to be stable enough to do much better.

In my case, they made up for it with love and attention that brought plenty of comfort but few answers. I know many people pine for that sort of thing, but it's very heavy for a child to go through. People often foolishly romanticize a life where anything seems possible as long as they feel supported. They think that support is the missing piece. What they don't think about is all the times that kid is going to walk directly into a wall and have to find the courage to not be mad at the wall or lose their shit and turn radical like those people on reddit. Love is not enough for hope, and hope is not a plan.

On the other end I had some friends whose parents brought plenty of answers without much love. Those people found some early success in life, but ended up restless and unsatisfied following someone else's path.

You can again say I'm being extreme, but my own experience with relationships is to bridge this gap is almost impossible. Trust is hard and must go both ways, and the current social climate makes it harder than ever. I am still young enough to give it time I guess. I'm not saying no to a family ever. I'm saying I don't know enough to be confident I can do better.

To be clear, I'm saying I've never met someone that has the curiosity and unyielding stubbornness to truly know something (in the Richard Feynman sense) while still being strong enough to be vulnerable and really love their family over all else. What few out there exist and meet that bar must then somehow find each other and commit. It's tough.

I said this in a different comment but the real key is just knowing what’s right for you. Knowing yourself is actually very hard though.

I don't really know myself either, just the flaws I have (right now). I found them by pushing outside my comfort zone.

Sometimes you just need to know when to stop pushing for a while and come back later. Later can be sooner than you think, or never. It's the whole point of living. I'd find it miserable to be over my skis the entire time, but I still take risks here and there. How else do you find out?

This is the way!

Yeah, everyone I know who doesn’t have a child/not planning to have zero connection to Reddit or anything online. Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays. And as they watch other going child free or 1-2 children, they realize that life is possible nowadays.

"Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays"

Do they? Or have most just become too distorted to feel allright filling their emptiness with empty online debates and netflix?

I know people who are really happy without kids (and who will never have them), but the majority is rather miserably lonely when you look past the facade. And with many, there isn't even a facade.

The parents aren't lonely, but they're tired and mostly miserable.

I haven't asked "why should I even try" in ages. The question "how do I even manage this hell" has been on my mind more often.

Well, unfortunately I also have asked myself that question way too often, but I cannot agree on the "mostly miserable" part when comparing childless single persons and parents. Life can be hell, but with kids you don't ask the question so much why even get up - because the purpose is clear. There are people depending and counting on you.

This matches my experience but I'd add a layer = purpose from kids isn't automatic. For years I had kids and still felt hollow because I was showing up physically but not really present. Getting sober changed that. Suddenly the purpose that was always there actually landed.

Then I did something unexpected...I started building. Taught myself to code at 45 while being a stay-at-home dad. Now I have both: the deep purpose of raising kids and the creative purpose of making something from nothing every day.

The combination is what did it for me. Kids alone didn't fix the emptiness. Building alone wouldn't have either. But kids gave me the reason to get up and building gave me something to look forward to after bedtime (and not the leftover scotch glass on my nightstand).

> but with kids you don't ask the question so much why even get up - because the purpose is clear.

No question about that. My life has become simpler in many ways: the annoying big questions have gone away.

> but the majority is rather miserably lonely when you look past the facade

People make their own choices, and it’s not up to me, nor you, to make assumptions on their lives. If children give you fulfilment, god speed to you. If others can find happiness without children, god speed to them.

By the way, I’m speaking as a person who wants children. But I totally get my child-free friends. I know people in their 60s as well, who debated this question and found a life for themselves. There is always a “what if question” hanging around, but all in all, they’ve weighed their options and are generally happy.

I think a lot of people who ended up having children to find fulfilment did not find happiness in other means. So they can’t experience the “other side’s argument”. Same applies to child-free people, as they haven’t experienced the other side.

Well, I do think I can make assumptions about other people's life, but yes it is their choice and life. (But I did experience the child free independent state for a long time, I wasn't unhappy, it was a different life, but I was always clear that I wanted to have children one day)

And I did not, nor would I ever say people need to have children to be fullfilled. Those who question whether having children is the right choice, I would never urge to do it. Rather the contrary as you cannot reverse this decision and if you find out after the act, no, children are too much for me - then it is too late.

Kids are a cheat code to finding fulfilment. Some rare people are able to make it themselves, but they are the exception. I think most people who post on social media about living their best DINK lives are either lying to us, themselves, or have never experienced fulfilment and confuse it with margaritas on the couch with Netflix.

A lot of is biological, all life is hardcoded to be rewarded by the success of their offspring. I’m a father of two teen boys, the ups and downs of parenthood has brought me more joy than I ever thought possible. Two of my best friends have no kids while one other has 4(!). They all seem to be doing fine and are happy healthy people. They key is just knowing what works best for you.

Edit: my friends without kids have more cash for toys (boats, trips, etc) but it doesn’t make me resentful or anything. Besides, they let me play with their toys whenever I want :)

No DINK I know posts anything about their lives ever. Probably the most "quietly enjoying their lives" people ever. Most people get jaded through social-media as it's just pure hate-rage baited content from all the sides. Most people are normal, they're just living. It's not up to you, or me to dictate what they're supposed to find fulfillment in.

This sounds to me like rationalizing the regret of losing independence due to having children, and realizing one can never go back.

That's a sweeping statement. I find fulfillment in learning things and focusing on issues I care about (environment, housing, politics).

I think this is an oversimplification of a much more general social phenomenon. In much of the world, the mainstream social message is still that kids are what you should get your life's purpose and fulfillment from. Maybe not so much for men, but very much so for women. There is a reaction to that social expectation, which is independent of Reddit (it's true even in China etc).

I'm myself very happy I don't have children. I'm gay and can't adopt in my country, so I'm also happy I don't have any desire to have children, because that would be a problem. However I do really like working with teens, and it's very important to me on a gut level.

People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, just because they don’t want kids doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to others’ happiness lol. People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids

> People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors,

This describes all of the childless people age 50 and older than I know.

It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it.

There's a big difference between childless and r/childfree style people, though.

> People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids

FIRE rose to popularity before this economy, though. It felt like peak FIRE was during ZIRP when it was easy to get a high paying tech job even if you barely had the skills for it. All the blogs and influencers made it sound so easy to just keep that going straight into early retirement as long as you continued living an austere lifestyle, which came with implied advice to avoid having kids.

I followed several of the FIRE blogs and forums in the early days but had to stop reading after they started filling up with people convinced they could retire at age 36 with $1.2 million in the bank because they they lived frugally last year and decided they could keep coasting that way for another 50 years without their lifestyle changing. I remember reading a few disaster stories from people who thought they were doing leanFIRE with their spouse until their spouse grew up and realized they actually wanted kids and to be married to someone who had a little more ambition in life. I know these stories aren't what FIRE is supposed to be about in the theoretical optimal sense, but there were so many stories like this that the forums just felt like a sad place to be.

>It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it.

Do you actually know a lot of those people? I know a lot of people that don't have kids and they all are very normal, well adjusted people. None of them hate kids. Using the word "breeders" as derogatory is weird, bordering on mentally unwell behavior. I've never met anyone that doesn't have kids that's like that. Even for the few people I've met that don't particularly care for children, they just keep it to themselves.

Reddit I think is not representative of real life for the vast majority of people.

I've read and posted to r/childfree and similar subs in the past, but I quickly came to realize that the people there are not your typical child-free people.

They're mostly bitter anti-child people who rail against what they see as entitlements that parents get that non-parents don't. They derisively call parents petty and mean things like "breeders" and seem to be a very cynical bunch. I'm not saying their feelings are always ridiculous; certainly some of them have reasonable reasons for feeling the way they do. But they're a mostly-toxic, vocal minority.

It really annoys me when people assume all (or even a significant number) of childfree people are like those reddit folks (not accusing you of that, just saying in general.

And I don't get the automatic association between FIRE and childfree that some people are making here. Sure, FIRE is easier if you don't have kids, but IME the two groups are only loosely connected, at most.

I'm in my mid-30s with a partner that also doesn't want kids, saved probably 80% of my takehome for 5-6 years, and leanfire is within reach so it's doable. I don't need much, my main interests are cooking, learning, biking, etc. It's been a godsend as I developed a mobility issue and have to take time off to heal. I'm naturally frugal but had I not been intentional about planning for my future I would be in a bind. YMMV.

I think more than FIRE people should just focus on FI. You still have to do something with your day after becoming financially independent and a job is still one of many good ways to contribute to the community even if you don't technically need one. So retiring is an option but not the only one.

On the other hand it remains quite confusing that after centuries of capital achieving vastly better results than labour people still keep going for labouring as their primary strategy. Building up a strong income-generating capital base is just common sense and it is an extremely good idea to have enough that you could technically avoid working if it made sense.

You don’t have to do something with your day. Most people will but you don’t have to.

> dont want to deal with kids

Someone has to bring up the next generation, the no kids crowd want all the luxury of having the next generation without putting in the effort or spending the money.

I suppose that people who actively do not want to have kids should not have kids. Their hypothetical kids won't be happy and well-developed, but instead always feel that they are an undesired burden.

Instead, people who like having kids should have more kids. This would proliferate a healthy culture that sees kids as a source of happiness, not a burden of misery taken out of necessity.

I am not convinced that is true. Once you actually have kids it changes your outlook too dramatically. Someone who does not want to have kids before they have a kid, will almost certainly love any kid they actually have.

Having a look at your state/country's foster care registry and the foster care industry as a whole might change your feelings on that.

> I suppose that people who actively do not want to have kids should not have kids.

I would describe myself as being the converse of that statement. I do not believe my desires should truly have much of a bearing on my situation.

> Instead, people who like having kids should have more kids.

To make this work you need some kind of cross-subsidy (e.g. large child tax credit), because having a larger number of kids requires the means as well as the will and the people willing to do it aren't all billionaires.

But then we do essentially the opposite and drive up housing prices when larger families need more house. Higher housing prices are essentially a transfer from young and future families to retirees.

That's a very instrumental and de-humanizing way to look at humans. Only as enablers of further enablement. Know that there is no inherent reason at all why there should be a next generation, if we, collectively, do not want one. Some are interested in this, others not, and that's perfectly fine.

The assumption that humanity must, and shall, exist forever has no proof.

There are other ways to give to the next generation than having kids of your own. Kids love "fun" uncle/aunts too!

In my opinion, it's better to not have kids when you are not 100% LOCKED IN on wanting them instead of gambling and potentially being forced into a commitment you never wanted to make.

Nonsense, there are plenty of childless teachers, scientists, etc that devote themselves to helping humanity. If someone wants to become an expert in their field towards this end, how can they devote themselves while having kids? It would kneecap you.

Why would having kids kneecap you? Most people who are experts in their fields do have kids.

Almost all the teachers I know have kids. Most scientists do. Einstein had three kids, Dirac four, and Planck five. Marie and Pierre Curie managed two.

It is a massive financial strain and time sink. It's hard enough to make it as is. Tech in particular requires so much self study, especially in this market. Einstein, Dirac, Planck - they did minimal housework and led lives almost completely centered around their academic work. Curie seems to be an exception afaict.

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They really don’t.

They just post about how important those things are online but not doing much about it.

> People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids

That is not restricted to the “current” economy. It has been that way throughout all of human history (and probably applies to other animals too).

Who wouldn’t want security of energy, food, shelter, healthcare, and education?

Everyone worries about what happens to their kids if they get injured, or even just lose their job. It’s only in the last few decades that a significant portion of people have access to more of that security (even though it’s only an increase of 1% to 10% of the US).

Now we have free brokerage accounts and low cost index funds so being financially independent has a catchy acronym.

> There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness.

This is very well put.

I think the culture today is what pushes us towards that: we have a very individualistic culture, which I think comes from the US. I'm from southern Europe, where family used to be very important, whereas now we've adopted a much more individual-centered view.

We have "freedom" as a value, but it's hard to tell what to do with it. You are privileged, therefore you can do whatever you want. But what is it that I want? What do I do with my freedom, privilege, options? We also need an objective, and "to be happy" is not a good objective, because we humans are very bad at predicting what will make us happy. Seeing stereotyped photos of happy people on tropical beaches on Instagram makes it even harder to remember what happiness is.

For happiness you need objectives, things you believe in, a sense of purpose.

> We have "freedom" as a value, but it's hard to tell what to do with it. You are privileged, therefore you can do whatever you want. But what is it that I want?

Well, that's the key question isn't it? What do we actually want?

In America it is dead simple. Having successfully cut all of our important social ties & creating all this existential anxiety via propaganda, "free enterprise" has swooped in promising to solve all our ills with the simple tap of a credit card.

Lonely? Here pay for a therapist. Need childcare? Get a nanny. Need exercise? Buy a gym membership. All in service to inflating the vanity metric that is the US GDP.

No one chooses to be born. Once they are, they may find that procreation is impossible for them or just not something they'll do well or even want. None of these is necessarily depressing.

We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.

We are on course to have far more elderly people than young people.

A global retirement community without even any grandkids to visit them strikes me as a depressing dystopian future.

The question is what happens after they are gone?

I see less burden on earth's environment as a positive.

More likely it will be a larger burden on the environment. If there are no future generations to care about then why bother investing in a better future?

the earth regenerates itself, provided we stay out of the way. if anything there's more motivation to care when the degredation slows down and makes change feel tangible.

not necessarily connected to the number of people but the type - if they are all conservationists that would be a net positive, not counting OTT population numbers.

we're talking about aging in advanced economies - those are folks with heavy footprints. if the west could be content with africa's growth and allowing for more migration, this problem is licked.

Not to contradict your conclusion but many countries definitely have an extreme shortage of new humans

Lines on a map are just that. Globally we're doing fine. And anyway, constant growth can't continue forever, it's probably a good thing if we stabilize or even shrink a bit.

> Seems like a terribly depressing way to live

This sounds very judgmental. Don't assume there's a single way to live a happy life. People with kids aren't immune to depression or lack of purpose.

> People with kids aren't immune to depression or lack of purpose.

Especially when their kids turn into adults and don't need them anymore. Having "kids" doesn't last that long.

> Having "kids" doesn't last that long.

The day my oldest son (he’s 16) was born I was holding him and my mom said “enjoy every minute because you’ll blink and it will be over”. I got two years left and he’s off to college. Just two years, it feels like I’m getting fired. She was right, as mothers usually are.

Yeah it’s kind of crazy. My opinion of course, but I think it’s a big part of growing up to realize that your life being “yours” only lasts about 20-25 years. You have your childhood, then your time as a young adult to have your fun and set yourself up/work towards your own life goals, find your place in the world.

Once that’s done there really isn’t a purpose in life other than to pass it along to someone else. Dare I say that’s your responsibility. What are you gonna do, buy another toy? Go to another bar?

This has clearly triggered a lot of people, with the full spectrum of arguments for and against having kids below. I'm bookmarking this as an example of driving engagement by taking a fairly benign topic ('helping others was rewarding!') with an extreme view on a topic that everyone has a stake in ('an entire generation lost the plot on life').

How amazing and ironic or a reminder it is that the comments below that seem the most reasonable and avoid generalizing an entire group of people or way of life are the ones that are the least likely to drive more comments because they are perfectly reasonable.

Yeah, and I do get it to some extent. Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I wouldn't swap with another person on this planet.

> Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing.

You got lucky and had kid(s) that were not extremely difficult to raise. Not everybody gets that. Not all kids are alike. Some will make your life a living hell. It is a total crapshoot.

Also, not everybody enjoys parenting, even if they have easy kids. We are not all built the same.

I did get lucky and had relatively easy kids. I love them. But, I do not enjoy parenting.

> Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard.

I love my kids and they're pretty great (and seem easy by comparison to others), but it's definitely burdensome and hard.

100%. I never was excited about having a kid but it's totally amazing to be helping a little human that you love to figure out the world and grow into a good person.

People can obviously make the opposite choice, but I'd encourage anyone that's never been around good little kids as an adult, to find a way to be around them in a helpful or fun role for a while. Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. My volunteering at a church youth group in my early 20's probably gave me the nudge I needed.

I coached a sports team for 6-10 year olds during the summers as a college student and agree that there are some incredible kids who are a joy to mentor and be around.

But probably my biggest concern with having kids of my own is that you can't really choose their personalities. Even the best parents can end up with kids who are frankly much less enjoyable to be around.

> Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids.

I’d love to have had kids, but ew. That is creepy. When you’re a single man even just beyond 30, trying to be around other’s kids isn’t a good idea in today’s society. Besides, trying to play your part while the kid is in another education schema is inconvenient because any meaningful perspective on life might conflict with the parents’.

Existence is suffering. But there are moments that make it worthwhile. When you have a kid, you not only get more of those moments, but you give those moments to people in the future.

Yeah kids are often more interesting and insightful and fun than adults. It’s wonderful to have their refreshing perspectives in your life.

> Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.

For some it works for some it doesn’t. The hard problem is knowing yourself well enough to make the right choice. Personally, I’m in the “you get what you give” camp but I know not everyone is. Again, the key is knowing which camp you actually belong in. I want to add that “knowing yourself well enough” is no small task and can take a lifetime meanwhile you encounter the forks in the road of life almost daily so.. much easier typed than done.

/turning 50 in about 2 months so, while not that old enough to be considered wise, have been around the block once or twice

I agree with you but i'd add our cultures pushed these psychological profiles (not far from mine) into running for some kind of (supposed) early safety because entering adulthood felt too bland heavy and risky.

From the few ive read about previous decades, people joined adult life earlier, with easier and better integration around adults and cheaper housing or similar needs. This creates a different existential landscape imo

I want to do that some of the time, not all the time, that's the difference.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

This is a rather uni-dimensional and, might I say, judgemental view of the CF movement. People choosing to be child-free just want to have "no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves" - really? What about women finally taking agency and rejecting the belief that they must have kids to be fulfilled? You also seem to completely ignore the economic state of the world. The economic conditions we grow up in leave a psychological imprint and influence the choices we make, even as adults.

I have the utmost respect for people with kids, but I also think that an individual needs to be 100% ready to have one, and not just reproduce because it would somehow provide them with a purpose.

Sure why not get trapped youself with responsibilities and work your life off making rich people even richer.

That's just childish. Eventually you'll have to learn responsibilities (towards other people) are a privilege and necessary for a full life. You'll just keep getting (more) bitter and lonely until you understand that.

I think what they mean is that "responsibility to society" has been co-opted by capitalists such that even our own children are a resource we're expected to raise to further contribute to endless growth and someone else's profit margins.

None of us are really contributing to each other when we work, or the commons, since that's all been purchased and is being rented back to us.

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Something about FIRE makes people have a visceral reaction. How DARE people not work like the rest of us. I get the purpose part if they were like teachers or doctors or something. Nope. SWE at Meta.

A lot of people can't comprehend trying to restrain their consumption either, they try to poke holes in your plans to assuage themselves that their lifeplan is the right one.

> I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live

Does it?? That sounds like the perfect life for me - I don’t need to contribute to others to make myself happy, I’m already happy on my own.

To me, this sounds like there’s something wrong with you - your capacity to just be happy by yourself is broken, you need the happiness of others to validate your life, and that’s a terrible way to live, always desperate to get what you need from others.

what does “FIRE” mean in this context? I can’t figure it out

Financial Independence, Retire Early

It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act. It is, in fact, the ultimate vanity of which humans are capable. Raising little variations of yourself might make you feel good, but if you think it's a unique path to a fulfilling life I suggest you are the one in the little bubble.

> It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act

This is a strawman position in my opinion. I don't think there's that many people who think they're carrying out some selfless act by having children. It's simply biologically true that the children you'll probably have the easiest time raising are your own and, assuming we want to continue as a species, we do need people to have children. It's fine to have them, fine to not, neither side has some moral high ground.

I think what usually gets mixed up is how the responsibility works, and biological children sit at the overlap.

The thing I most crucially remember about my son being born is that it felt downright easy to simply dive into all the things I would now be doing: because there was no one else. I either got it done or it didn't get done.

Someone else's kids on the other hand there is a choice: their parents.

It's not absolute IMO but you also see it echoed by working too: when it's your job, it's a lot easier to simply go "right I need to handle this" then when it's not.

I think this mindset might be unique to western "atomic families." I have friends that would talk similarly about this kind of responsibility to cousins or non "genetically related" people in their village.

Whether it is vanity or not is not determined by what you are doing, but why you are doing it. The vanity is not intrinsic.

It’s uh, historically proven, so to say.

We are having fewer children and also seeing huge increases in loneliness and mental health problems.

Even despite the mitigating effect of having fewer children, we are seeing huge increases in loneliness and mental health problems.

Fortunately I have this magic tiger rock that keeps tigers away, I think it works for those things too.

The problem though is that relationships with others are risky. When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with. Even if I could reproduce by budding, this is not an environment I want my kids to grow up in. "Dad, why did you make me into a world full of normies?"

> When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with.

Candidly, if half of your friends are in regretful marriages and 90% of the people you encounter are "crap" then I would be questioning your social filtering.

From experience I think 90% of people are really liquid crap. filtering can get it down to 50% or less but it also means you are WAY more lonely

There’s an old saying regarding what you’re saying.

Higher social classes have always despised the lower ones. Imagine going to ancient Rome and saying that slaves should be given full citizenship and treated as equals.

"liquid crap" is obviously exageration but if you take a truly random slice of population 90% will be any combination of not interesting/not a nice person/hidden agenda or want to exploit you/have crazy views/...

many of them are higher class than me. in absolute numbers it's more lower class simply because there are fewer rich people than poor people but take 5 truly random people of either high or low, I think you would agree with me that only 1 at best you would want something to do with.

In low socio-economic communities shit behaviors are more tolerated.

Did you just try to illustrate his point? Not emphasizing with someone’s difficulty and trying to turn his difficulty into a flaw of his character is a good example of how society is destructuring itself.

Let me guess: you are somehow NOT part of the “liquid crap” category?

The world is always full of danger. This moment in time is exceptional only in the form of that danger, not in its substance.

When those of us with noble traits -- intelligence, empathy, morality and so on -- refuse to reproduce, we do so at the cost of allowing the OTHERS who lack those traits to make up a larger and larger percentage of the population. They WILL reproduce.

Food for thought.

Are we back to the beliefs into inherited nobility already?

This could also be read as a take on the nurture aspect of childrearing.

It is literally just game theory. If you don't act, others still will. Multiply that times 8 billion and you have an evolutionary process that rewards the dumbest amongst us.

There are things that aren't true but the wider society must believe to be true in order to maintain social order. Think of religion for example. "We are all equal" is also one of those things.

So just teach those traits to other people? You don't need to have kids to help.

Yes, that is possible, and I didn't claim that having kids is the only way to influence humanity... obviously.

Childlessness seems to be an increasingly compassionate choice. Degrowth by force.

Quick reminder than you can have (gradual) degrowth with every couple having 2 children.

The extreme mode of 50% of child-bearing age adults going 0 kids is not necessary and will probably end up being disastrous.

Childlessness is a beautifully self-removing trait.

Ideas aren't genetic.

It doesn't have to be genetic to be 'self-removing'.

What happened to the Shakers?

OK, religious ideas are kind of genetic via indoctrination. (Epigenetic? Heh.)

Meanwhile ideas can be "self-removing" due to being bad, but then you'd just say "that's a bad idea" not "that's self-removing", so genetic descent was implied.

I didn't say the Shakers had a bad idea, it just was an idea that led to them removing themselves from further existence that was not genetic. Whether that was a good or bad decision is an entirely separate judgement call.

No choice is more selfish and misanthropic.

I did not want to come across as misanthropic. I like humanity for the overwhelming part, if not for its unfortunate tendency to go apeshit from time to time or to ruthlessly exploit the most beautiful and conplex machine in this part of the universe. I also don't mean to say it is necessarily desirable for societies to age this fast.

It's a choice I made for myself, that I am ready to bear the consequences of, say paying a greater share for other's childcare/making society more family-friendly/later retirement. I just would not want to add another ~copy of my soul to this pile. Yet I respect those who do.

"Degrowth" is misanthropic, I guess, unless you think the world is overpopulated structurally somehow, as in you'd like more humans but only in due course and under more favorable (global?) circumstances.

But I think looking at this in global terms is wrong-headed anyway, whether you're for or against. The question is whether a specific person should be a parent here and now in specific personal circumstances. So of course it tends to be selfish. It's not entirely selfish since others are involved locally, including the future child. But "the world needs more children" or "the world needs fewer children" is barely relevant at all.

The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.

No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.

The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".

> Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles"

Hey dude these are my emotional support rectangles!

Truth is, anything can be meaningful. We make our own meaning and almost anything will do as long as you believe in it. If optimizing rectangles on the screen makes you happy, that’s great. If it doesn’t, find something else to do.

Yup, because there are plenty of opportunities to get tokens to feed your family outside of moving those rectangles. Not.

It’s really just because those of us choosing this profession are also very good at optimizing chosen metrics. But don’t always ask whether they are good metrics and whether they become counterproductive past some point.

These are all value judgements that reflect your disillusionment rather than some universal truth.

No one is attached to some mythical objective reality. Everyone is imprisoned by the same social, economic and thought prisons.

This is one of the reasons why I'm so disgusted by the mainstream voices around AI. As if I'm going to be "left behind" because my only priority isn't increasing shareholder value or building a saas that makes the world a worse place.

Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.

> That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.

I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.

This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.

I’ve spent too much time talking to Claude, because this sounds exactly like one of its messages

Absolutely! That’s a great point.

For real though, I’m not wasting tokens on comments. I do wonder if we will pick up habits when interacting with them a lot though.

I 100% thought this was written by an LLM. You copy its style if it wasn't. Or it has copied yours! Lol

For real the grammar is so good its sus, did you aprse this through claude?

I don't think the grammar is "good", it just uses speech patterns like LLMs do.

Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel.

My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.

Yep yep and yep. The massive move towards individualism in our culture is making people lonely and empty.

^^ This comment sums up the entire philosophy of happiness very well, although you first have to go through life to get the context to understand it.

I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.

I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.

I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.

And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.

I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Plenty of time left. Create a tinder account, or adopt a child. Adpoting a child is the most self-less thing you could do. There are countries where single men are allowed to adopt. If you are rich, move there, become resident, adopt, and move back. Problem solved! As a bonus, being a single father then makes it more probable for you to meet a woman.

This, I got married at 40 to a 36 year old. We both wanted kids and a family but for reasons it hadn’t worked out for either of us. This wasn’t a Disney romance by any means but we get along and we put in the work to make it work. We had two kids back to back and I can say without a doubt what we have built is greater than any one of us.

Trust there are some really great women in their thirties, they may not have been your first choice, you probably wouldn’t have been theirs either, but from where I sit it was worth it.

I think the modern idea that it is only OK to marry and have kids because you are in love is part of the problem.

Lots of cultures have arranged marriages that most people are happy with. There is nothing immoral about seeking someone you can live with in order to build a life together and to have an raise children with them.

its probably a safer path to happiness than the romantic one. I did that and it very definitely did not work out and I am now divorced. I do have two kids though and have been a single dad for the last few years (the younger one is about to turn 18 so that phase of my life is coming to an end).

You could easily still have a marriage and children.

It is a good reminder that most of us that work in software engineering will never build anything remarkable and will fade into history. Even if you do brilliant engineering work for a company, said work was commissioned by the company and the intellectual property rights belong to said company. It wasn't yours to begin with.

Children are not typically known for sitting quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal himself was unmarried and childless, and died at the relatively young age of 39.

Just because you can't relate to a way of living doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Even if it's the oldest lesson, it's one we all need to learn, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday was the best time to have learned it. 2nd best is always today.

There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.

Agreed! I'm not sure why the GP comment has a somewhat negative attitude about it, I think it's great for people to realize this and talk about it, every year a whole new year's worth of young adults turn up not knowing it! Insert XKCD lucky 10,000 comic here

Not meant to be negative.

Ah -- IME people usually start a sentence with "in the nicest possible way" when they're couching something mean is all. Often it's even sarcastic, and the meanness isn't even meant to be couched, so I wasn't sure how to read it

Agreed, the default connotation / reading of this phrase implies a snide attitude.

> Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.

Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.

Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.

I could have written the same comment. Maybe it was me just sitting down one weekend and really giving them a chance but something changed early this year. The coding agents just got really good or, like I said, maybe it was me just taking a hard look at them. For better or for worse, the software dev industry is never going back to they way it was.

One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.

I look at it like this: Yes, AI can write code. It can write it much faster than I can. Sometimes it can also write it better than I can.

But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.

I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis.

Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void of educational value, or enjoyment).

On the other hand, what that code does depends entirely on a particular understanding of the real world, which is indescribably complex (i.e. combinatorially explosive). This is what I truly care about, and the possibilities for the application and customization of software are infinite. The interface between the world and software will always involve a value decision that AI cannot have a monopoly over (it would be economically infeasible, no matter how cheap inference becomes). This means that as long as my passion is not within the machine, but is instead centered on the relationship between the machine and the world, I will never be out of a job.

And part of me thinks, "good riddance!". For all the good we created, developers have also generated so much bullshit, it's honestly insane that any software companies were ever successful in spite of it. The human-politicking is probably the worst of it - think of the countless years of human life wasted in scrum ceremonies - but also so much of the software we've created sucks, and users hate it!

We used to be a proud culture of hackers, building miracles with miniscule resources, or at least that's what the greybeards here on HN like to whine about. They're right, we've squandered limitless cycles, uncountable exabytes of useless data. If there was a God of hackerdom, we are living in his Gomorrah, and he will strike us down with AI as punishment for these sins.

What makes you think that AI cannot become significantly better than humans at "understanding" and modelling the world? If the AI is always more likely to be right than you or me due to being able to take more variables/knowledge into account by default, then why ever listen to a human, or even to yourself when it comes to an economic decision?

My honest and rather pessimistic take is that in the long-term any craft that purely lives in the abstract is likely to be doomed.

It's not that it won't be better at understanding, it's that there's too many possibilities to understand. This is true for humans too, but I can use the output to make money in a particular scenario.

Take even 1 simple example - software applications on a smart watch. How many dimensions of reality are relevant? Maybe I'm a busy person, so I need a personal assistant for my calendar. Maybe my wife needs access too. Maybe I'm a bird watcher and I'd like to track the birds I see. Maybe I'm a bird researcher and those observations need to integrate with my research.... ad nauseum forever.

AI will write all the code, and make all the meaningful decisions, but the backstop of the whole thing has to be some non-virtual reality with a paying user, otherwise there is no value to extract.

I personally only care about the outcome, I don't even really care if I understand how anything else works, or any of the decisions made. My dollars go in, working code comes out to suit me.

I agree with your overall perspective here. You need the human in the loop to ground the request/direction in a reality with human needs, but that's about it.

What I was getting at is that nothing stops you from asking AI what would be the next best smartwatch app to build, and based on all its aggregated knowledge and other inputs (e.g. search) it has, it can potentially make a better estimation than you or any human of a product that would sell.

Of course whether that is actually true depends on how well its training data is able to model/mimic reality, and how grounded its inputs (e.g. internet) are. You can always help it a bit by steering it into the right direction, providing additional grounding. Was mainly wondering for how long this "additional" guidance would be a necessity, fearing that it won't be for as long as we think.

I agree with you. I think the "additional guidance" era we are in will be measured in single-digit years.

Good thinking on the relationship between machine and world. Very reassuring.

I am trying to think of it like hand tools vs power tools. As long as I work in construction, I'll have to use power tools. Maybe one day I'll support myself by making fine furniture. I'd like that.

I don't mean this flippantly; works for the Amish!

If you do not know yet. Artists had been destroyed first.

> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)

We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.

Does it have to get any better than it is, to totally upend a huge swath of society?

The challenge is whether any of those meaningful things we can do will pay the mortgage.

At the very least these ai threads where we argue this ai topic will be of great historical interest as our profession either dies or mutates to something else!

I think you're missing the point. My entire career has been looking up and reusing code written by humans who are objectively better at writing code than AI ever will be (please don't argue about this).

Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.

My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.

With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.

I love this! Stealing it! :) It reminds me of T.H.I.N.K. before you speak. Ask yourself if what you are about to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind!

https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/right-speech

It's hard.

As I get older I've realized that speaking less and just listening more has a LOT of value

That’s some powerful self insight you achieved.

As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

> I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.

I recall being pretty miserable working in a maze of cubicles surrounded by coworkers. I don't think there are single solutions for any of these questions. What works well for one person will not work well for another.

So interesting. I also found work in tech, as a DS, more gratifying than teaching. But part of that was finding remote work freeing. Office work is Kafkaesque. I can easily work 40 hours a week or produce more than the equivalent amount of progress on assigned tickets, but I just can't fake being a good officemate for 8 hours a day straight. Plus progress seems so slow in the office. So many distractions and interruptions. With no opportunity to decompress.

I'm sure we've all met an unhappy teacher. As well, ain't no way you're pulling me back into an office ;)

I work mostly remotely, recently our Fibre internet upgrade left us without internet for a week. It forced me to work from a nearby university library - which turned out to do wonders for my mental health.

I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.

Thanks for saying that! I was worried I was the only one. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I was happy to get back to a little more determinism in my day to day.

Super interesting to hear your experience, I agree that it is very dystopian. I have put up with it (with effect on my performance and somewhat my mental health), to be around my family more. Things like doing pick up and drop offs at school consistently has been wonderful.

This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.

Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time?

I had an awful experience as a lead thanks to the latter.

The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.

I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.

Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.

I started programming when I was eleven years old and I’m now in my 40s. I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

Same here. I've long had the feeling that the internet could somehow help the world, but honestly, I don't feel that's the case anymore.

There is a whole lot of crap out there. But I think the Internet HAS been a game changer in lifting people out of poverty and increasing standards of living. Communication is awesome. And although there is a lot of propaganda (which there has always been) there is now also a lot of truth and counter claims. It’s no longer just the rich that have access to information (think of farmers guessing at what their crop was worth). I _hope_ AI will do similarly, but I have my doubts on that one.

The irony of the moment is that a billionaire in a Michelin-star restaurant and a homeless person on the street are scrolling through the same Instagram feed.

Technology doesn't do anything by itself. The result of it on the fabric of the society depends on how it is applied, whether the benefits are distributed to everyone (to some extent) or not. It's possible that taby technology is just used to displace people who lose their livelihoods and income while the benefits flow the capital owning class. In fact all the great productivity boosts that have taken place over the last decades since WW2 have mostly befitted the capital class. That's why a worker still grinds away 8h a week and barely scares by while the "elites" splurge on yacths, mansions and space travel for leisure.

jnovek, don't listen to him! Piracy is never the way.

https://youtu.be/9fUjwV4j-H0 (The Offspring - Have You Ever)

What if the the alternatives are worse?

There's a whole lot of us out there. I don't know if there's still a future in the thing that I love, which is where all the malaise comes from.

“Have you ever considered piracy? You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts”

https://youtu.be/IIbeFgaYTNs

Keep going? Just because there’s a different way to do what you like doing doesn’t mean you should stop.

Or become a carpenter. The world is going to be flooded by them.

I live in the Alps — every second person here is already a third-generation carpenter.

keep programming and learn to use AI.

it’s just another tool. lots of people didn’t want to use compilers and got left behind. the world moved on.

i’m older than you and doing fine. it’s just another tech upheaval, we’ve been through plenty.

yes it gets tiring and at some point you find your way off the treadmill. but it’s really not that hard to stay on, especially if you have the experience.

Do w hat we did in corporate/banking/other sociopathic envs did decades ago - find another source of fulfillment and happiness. For me its adventures and sports and kids, could be something else for the next joe.

Or just code as you want as a hobby, unrestrained, for whatever you need or makes you happy.

>I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.

This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.

A decade ago, you needed to think and choose from a dozen solutions, now AI provides you with two options to execute.

A/B testing/validation has become a sort of A/B creation method.

Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:

    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90
    FD 40
    RT 90

Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.

Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.

Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.

Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.

But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!

Crime rates going down and down. Purchasing power grows everywhere in the world (but we want much nicer things now, so don't feel it). Travel is more accessible that it ever was in humanity history. Information keeps getting more and more accessible.

And literacy rates are increasing. I don't know why you say it's not, just google "literacy rates trend".

Efficiency gains have primarily benefited the capital owners. Workers ability to buy essentials like housing and healthcare have not gotten worse, not better.

I can cover every wall of my living space in flat screen color television more cheaply than feed, house, heal, and educate another child in my family.

I started reading about the industrial revolutions and the evolution of capitalism recently. And it is my understanding that something similar was happening around the second industrial revolution - normal people barely making a living while owners of massive factories and other "means of production" getting richer rand richer.

That's why communism got so popular in some places and why after capitalism won, it demonized communism so much that people now think those are the only two options and communism is the bad one so capitalism must be the good one.

There are other options like mutualism or market socialism and people (including me until recently) have never heard of them.

Cooperatives exist and most people don't even know what that word means.

We need a system where ownership of both the means of production and more importantly the product goes to the workers. If production is more effective with an assistant ("manager") overseeing them, then can hire one and negotiate his salary collectively. If they need an investment, they can quantify the risk and agree how much the investor gets in return after how long but it should not give the investor a massive chunk of or complete ownership - at most it should give small ownership according to his hourly rate compared to other workers.

> Purchasing power grows everywhere in the world

Sure consumer goods are cheaper, but I don't need more "stuff". The essentials I need for my family: food, energy, housing, and most importantly time are much less accessible. Sure, we could buy bulk, move to a LCOL area and work remote, but not everyone can do that.

This is the trend that a lot of people in my generation complain about.

> Crime rates going down and down.

This scares me. Humans are getting so domesticated and docile they might soon be content with being pets. I am not sure US independence or French revolution could happen today.

I am obviously not a fan of crime against other peaceful individuals. But crime against an oppressive regime is still crime by that regime's rules.

> We're retiring later and later, working more per week

That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.

> purchasing power is going down

That is not a new thing.

> quality of goods is going down

Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ...

> life expectancy is decreasing

On the whole, this is not the case.

> child mortality is increasing

Globally?

> illiteracy is increasing

Globally?

You seem to have a negative view of things. And sure, many things are not great. But the examples you gave are not it.

Ya some people don't know the difference between their country falling apart versus the world falling apart.

What does it matter the world gets better when your neighbors do worse?

If all but one of my neighbors were improving, why would I focus on the one that insists on repeatedly shooting itself in the dick?

The other people in the world who aren’t your neighbors are also people.

But no one in their right mind cares more about other people in the world more than about himself and those closest to him.

> their country

Not even, I was taking the US as an example because they're at the front of this "tech will deliver us" hypothesis

> But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.

If given a choice I would rather be born in 1940s. 80 years of relative peace, prosperity, cheap education, cheap housing, only single parent needs to work, stronger community network, less overpopulation, better access to doctors, better wealth equality, and you get to partake in the first generation of computers before computers became a method of spying and manipulation of purchasing decisions. Honestly I would much rather be hacking on v6 unix than what I am currently doing.

Sign me up.

„only single parent needs to work”

I always wondered how much truth that was.

Turns out in 1950’s it was true for 65% of households. In 1960’s it dropped to 40% then in 70’s to 30% and in 90’s it landed at 20%.

So while you could support a family on a single income, it still was quite far from universally true and only most likely in the 50’s.

Would you want to be born a girl in the 1940s? How about as a non white person? And that is assuming you were even born in the US.

Before women had the ability to be professionals earning real money, or access to birth control and many, many other types of healthcare specific to women. Before no fault divorce and before rape within marriage was outlawed?

Decades before the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws still existed?

> better access to doctors

I would take a nurse today over a doctor from the 1940s. The amount of advancement in healthcare between 1940 to today, even just over the counter stuff or information wise from online searches is tremendous.

> Would you want to be born a girl in the 1940s?

My grandma was born in the 40s and said it was better back then.

> Decades before the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws still existed?

I don’t live in the USA so that is irrelevant.

Also, keep in mind I still have over half my life to live and the future seems very uncertain. Maybe I am a pessimist, but I would take 1940-2020 which I now know in hindsight was a pretty decent time to live compared to whatever the next 40 years holds. Maybe I am wrong and we will magically cure cancer, solve wealth inequality, 20 hour work weeks due to automation, and stay WW3.

> My grandma was born in the 40s and said it was better back then.

My grandma was also, and she will tell you women should not have as many rights as men. And that periods make women unclean. And kids should have to follow their parents’ religion. And corporal punishment for kids is okay. And daughter in laws should defer to parents’ in laws.

> Maybe I am wrong and we will magically cure cancer

Quality of life after a cancer diagnosis is leaps and bounds better today than it was in decades past. Setting the standard at what I presume is “take this pill and you never have to worry about cancer again” seems like a good way to disappoint yourself.

> Also, keep in mind I still have over half my life to live and the future seems very uncertain.

Things might very well be trending down, but they can still be better than the past in some ways, and worse in some ways.

The monkey's paw curls, and you are born as any of the many many many people who did not have access to any of those things lol.

But when meeting friends, you’d have to agree in advance to a spot and time and wait aimlessly, so many times in the day. Then you’d pick up smoking or reading depending on your character.

Sounds wonderful.

We've passed 7 of 9 climate tipping points so there's that. What kind of view do you expect a person to have if they pay any sort of attention?

Not globally, just in the place we let these things run at full speed without regulations: the US

> But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it?

This question always implies "to the high middle ages, or to 300CE". Of course I wouldn't. But to the 1990s? Probably I would.

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If you work most jobs, whether cognitive or manual labor, after some point you can't do them anymore, due to physical and cognitive decline, medical issues, and the plain fact that you can do that shit as a hobby if you really like it, but you shouldn't need to go to some fucking office or greet people in your local Walmart in your late 60s and 70s just to survive.

We call this stopping of work at that point retirement.

How about that?

Retirement is the withdrawal from active working life, i.e. having a job. It is not a US concept.

Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.

I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.

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The notion that one's economic output is equal to one's worth as a person seems pretty wrong-headed, when considering what the purpose of life is.

>when considering what the purpose of life is.

And what is that exactly?

At best we seem to be rather large containers to ensure that genes get replicated.

That's for us to decide as individuals.

How can something be both wrong and subjective?

When the definition is presupposed by somebody else without qualification.

no contest on the first part, but can you enlighten on what is the purpose of life?

What point are you trying to make?

Point being that at no point in your life are you bound to be defined by "job"-"retirement" state transition.

Shed it already.

When your job and commute is 70% of your awake time I can assure you are very well defined by your job

Only if your life is so insignificant and your interests and social circle so narrow that your paid gig determines the whole of it and is your sole purpose.

But if it ain't so, there is effectively no retirement?

Not having a job anymore is very different from not "doing things" at all.

So you're telling me that if you won $1b tomorrow you wouldn't know what to do besides continuing your 9 to 5 until you die?

It's the part where you stop being a wage slave and can enjoy some freedom, I know, such an alien concept

Funny, I also accidentally formatted my dad’s hard drive, destroying work, while trying to install Red Hat, though in my case it was 6.2 “Zoot” somewhere around 1999.

And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.

Humans are not smart enough.

People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited.

Most people are reactive.

If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created.

And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical.

They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.

This is the history of every empire.

It's also why every empire in history collapsed.

>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".

Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.

I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!

The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.

The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."

AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.

I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.

AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.

AI helps you to focus on the aspects that you are interested in. Perhaps you care about database nifty stuff, but you may need the front end to make an end to end solution. You can delegate that part to AI

Not disagreeing, but apart from coding the most boring part of the entire job is the one that's the hardest to correctly delegate to AI: testing and ensuring the whole thing is sound.

Which is why it's changing the calculus on junior devs: if you're not mature enough to do self-review and self-QA, you're just dead weight for the team/company.

What if you care about all the parts?

You don’t, there’s always a choice about what to include and what to exclude in your system.

Unless you are hand selecting every atom that goes into a thing (maybe you make nuclear weapons?), you always make choices about what you focus on and what is irrelevant to your project.

Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.

It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.

This analogy falls flat because

a) Carpentry already happens in the real world

b) There's a clear problem being solved (you need furniture).

Stretching your analogy to fit my point: pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander. If you're focused on the chair being built, getting a belt sander to help is great! If you're sanding for the craft (?) of it, focused on the wrist mechanics of rubbing sandpaper up and down, you'd be disappointed.

Maybe the disconnect, then, is that you don't consider programming to take place in the real world. I don't share that experience, any more than someone coding batch jobs on punch cards or an author committing chapters via typewriter. Maybe the medium has parts that only have meaning within our minds, but we are real (dammit!) and we punch out those characters with our real hands and we get frustrated and deal with impedance mismatches and want to scream and laugh and cry. There is a piece of us that lives in what we build. It's evidence that we are real.

This ties in with your second point. There are uncountably many ways to accomplish the goal of making a chair or writing a program. And if you are a carpenter working on a one-off matched dining set for a fickle client, the problem might not be as clear as even many software tasks are. Your skill and experience is highly likely to play into the eventual form and structure of the finished work. The customer might not know where you hid the dovetail joints or dominoes, but they can absolutely notice the grain continuity and lack of obvious engineered joinery evident in a factory piece.

If you don't care, then fine! You can focus on the other things that bring you joy. But I hope you can appreciate that some of us want to experience solving these problems with a bicycle for the mind instead of a Waymo.

There’s a third group of people: people who did it, got good at it, and got bored.

I do both carpentry and programming and both activities have long since become repetitive. There are only so many dovetails or distributed systems you can make.

That’s why I don’t care if AI can replace those parts. I’m in it to do the designing, not the crafting.

That would assume that the AI is as good at the repetitive parts as you were, which isn’t my experience. You still have to review and correct it, which is more boring and repetitive than implementing it yourself.

But I also disagree about the getting bored on the “crafting”. It may depend on what you do, but there are always new design decisions and trade-offs to make all the way down. This isn’t a solved problem, and AI doesn’t change that.

> pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander.

That analogy falls flat, because there is little creative difference between these two modes of sanding. In particular, there is approximately zero variation in what the belt sander does as a function of how you control it. It is a reliable, deterministic, very predictable tool. That’s as different from generative AI as a compiler is.

You cant convince anybody an ikea chair is just as good

It easy to convince a college student with $20 that an ikea chair is good. Artisanal is overkill for plenty of scenarios, and definitely those where time or money are constrained.

If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.

I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.

The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.

There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.

I’m sure the horses turned into glue were also very happy that the automobile made transportation so much more efficient, too.

If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.

What about mathematics means coding isn't automatible?

Also, hasen't coding gone through many waves of automation now?

Is it that hard to comprehend that some people enjoy writing code by hand just for the sake of coding?

I started coaching my son's little league baseball team a few years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could keep him interested it and I just wanted him to keep playing a team sport. But, that first season showed me how incredibly rewarding the whole process can be. Every practice, every game, you see them improve. And the more you work at designing a good practice, helping each player develop skills, the better they get! And, the joy...the pure, unadulterated joy of a short stop making a a clean throw to first for an out, a hit into the grass with a quick slide into second for a double, a dash across home after a wild pitch rolls into the cage for a run on the steal! I don't get paid, of course, but it's the best job I've ever had.

OP might love tech, but he sure doesn’t sound like he loved the craft.

Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.

Exactly, basically then every desk or office job means sitting next to a box?

I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?

The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.

CSS boxes!

Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.

Oh that makes sense, thanks. I don’t deal with CSS in my work. It seems like an oddly specific thing to reduce “tech” in general to.

Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“ But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.

Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.

I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.

Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.

Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it

> Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.

Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.

I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.

Thanks for this, I've ordered it and look forward to reading it!

Very interesting, explains why video games CAN be so much fun.

Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.

Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good.

But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.

So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.

Odd. I never felt that moving rectangles around was my shot at happiness. My whole career I've spent doing things I genuinely believe are useful and help people. If moving rectangles is no longer useful then so be it, I'll do something else.

I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example.

What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs.

It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.

Amazing story congrats on being a great coach - this kids will remember you and that experience.

My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon.

We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure…

Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!

> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.

I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.

I have had managers like this and it was fantastic. I’ve tried to be a mentor like this and enjoyed it too.

It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.

I suspect a lot of people don't actually dislike software development, they dislike developing without anyone invested in their development

I miss mentoring junior engineers in-person

“ For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place.”

Best summation of my current feelings yet.

I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.

Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.

Pretty certain the coaching is their job for the soccer coaches at our elementary school. 6 years of kids each with 3 practices a week + matches.

My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.

I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.

On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.

There is another, deeper level of happiness, not mentioned in any of these comments. Around 62% of the US population has found it. That number used to be higher. In the tech world it's much smaller percentage. The powerful love you feel as a father or mother can actually be compounded, even when didn't think that was possible. It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.

> It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.

If you are talking about Euclid's Elements, it has certainly been a joy to work through them again in my retirement.

Another joy, spend money on someone in need, someone in need of help.

And turns out the patterns and metaphor in this book can be co opted. Without belief in the supernatural, or submission to human authority structures. Though still receiving and giving the same benefits.

Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.

If you love helping children and also love moving small rectangles around a larger rectangle then Code Club from The Raspberry Pi Foundation is crushing it, and needs volunteers:

https://codeclub.org/

I've quit my career in academia three years ago and teach high school kids instead. I can totally relate, I'm just so much happier: I love those four things he listed, except the fourth for me is physics instead of basketball.

Great post. I coach my son’s club and school teams. 4 practices + games each week. A huge commitment but pays off in so many ways. Good for you for volunteering!

My happiness peaked sometime around 10-11 years old, it's been downhill ever since

In a similar but slightly different vein, I found that doing things with my own child (now 3.5 years old) is far more rewarding than I ever imagined. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the joy in his eyes when he discovers something new, accomplishes something or even just gets excited when I come home from work.

I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.

Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.

But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.

AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.

I don’t think this whole thing had anything to do with AI or not. It has to do with ‘teaching kids in a gym’ or ‘sitting in front of a screen in an office’.

What does this word salad mean?

“Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value.”

People anchor identity to the hardest part of their work. • Assembly → craftsmanship • Hand coding → engineering skill • Complex stacks → seniority • Writing longform → intellectual authority

The difficulty of the tool becomes proof of worth. “If few people can do this, then my contribution matters.”

So value feels intrinsic to the technical act itself.

⸻

“Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.”

Historically, this always happens.

Compilers replaced assembly expertise. Frameworks replaced boilerplate knowledge. Cloud replaced infrastructure mastery. AI replaces a lot of implementation effort.

Each time, people initially interpret it as:

the skill is dying

But what actually dies is the old measurement of importance.

Value moves up a level: from execution → judgment → direction → taste → responsibility

⸻

“But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.”

This rejects the common fear narrative.

The activities persist, what changes is why they matter.

You still code, but code is no longer scarce. You still write, but writing is no longer the bottleneck. You still design, but layout isn’t the achievement.

The work shifts from producing artifacts to choosing which artifacts deserve to exist.

⸻

“AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up.”

This is the core claim.

Old model:

effort → output → value

New model:

judgment → outcome → value

Previously you proved worth by volume, speed, or complexity.

Now production is abundant, so the scarce thing is: causal impact

Not:

Did you make something?

But:

Did reality change because you were involved?

You’re moving from manufacturing to intervention.

⸻

“The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.”

So the post ends optimistic.

AI doesn’t reduce agency, it removes the cost barrier to acting.

Before: You needed a team, funding, or org permission to affect the world.

Now: A single person can teach, fix, organize, build tools, or help communities directly.

Meaning shifts from scale (reach) to consequence (effect).

⸻

In one sentence

The post argues that AI doesn’t eliminate human contribution, it removes technical scarcity, forcing value to relocate from producing things to changing outcomes.

Next time you can just tell us you didn't write it.

The post predicted this response

A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability

It’s not exactly nominative determinism, but maybe this could all be explained by every Ben Wallace being destined for basketball greatness (middle school or nba or otherwise)

It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though.

Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.

> I accepted the propaganda that my value to this world only went as far as my product could scale. At 28, I’m finally beginning to challenge that.

this struck me

Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.

This is a nice sentiment and all but the issue is that I need to make money to pay for goods and services.

We are just priced out of having this type of happiness due to high cost of living in a first world urban environment.

Every single environment that has a critical mass of people will have an elementary and middle school. How could you possibly be priced out of this?

This entire concept doesn't exist in much of the world. The incredible prevalence of intramural sports, and the seriousness of it, at all kinds of age groups is a very US phenomenon. Let alone random neighborhood people coaching teams.

In most of the world it's more club-based rather than school-based, and that's quite different.

But surely they still need youth coaches?

> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.

In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.

> only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better

Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.

Just a reminder of how millennial-centric HN is. Everyone here is in their 40s and moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and this article provides validation.

It is kind of funny that people here tend to dump on Reddit a lot (often times warranted, don’t get me wrong), when this place is an echo chamber in a similar way.

I use my spare time helping kids at a FIRST robotics team. It's fun.

I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.

I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.

Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.

It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.

If I didn't have a mortgage and family that would work!

I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.

Had this thought multiple times over the years. However, reality in the UK is training cost and time (~2 years with 2 days a week college + at least ~£5k cost and further 2 years gaining experience) can be quite a blocker- difficult to achieve with dependents for most. Then throw in the reality of domestic work and building up experience. Greener grass and all that

Very similar to Texas. It's all about the hours. Will take 4 years to get to journeyman while working 40 hours on the field.

any electricians here who want to give a piece of advice?

Curious to read if you want to share a link. I've been thinking about this too.

Yeah sure, Email me by adding @gmail.com to my username and I can send it. I like to tell my self I'm still alittle anonymous online when I post but i blog with my real name.

To ask the question Ted Lasso never answers:

What is a Hoosier?

> If I could give any advice to someone who needs it, I’d tell them to write down the things that have made them happy, and then explore why.

> But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe.

What if sitting in front of a rectangle is the thing that makes you happy?

> You know those bullshit leadership positions we all had in high school and college? Like how you were “VP of Operations” for some club, and all you did was order pizza?

This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.

I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line.

I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.

I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.

Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.

Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.

I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.

Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.

I had a similar coaching experience. I took 2 years off and I'm excited to jump back into it this spring. It's tremendous fun and the impact is easy to discern.

I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.

One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.

I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.

Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!

Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.

I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.

really good

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