Independently Poor: A Twist on FU Money – a.k.a. “FU, Money”

I do realise that this only applies to those who CAN work remotely but that seems to be a large chunk of the userbase for HN.

Not having a job can sometimes feel like you don't have a long-term purpose, but I think that's mostly because we've been used to working, rather than any intrinsic thing. Besides, I don't know why having a long-term purpose at work is any more fulfilling than a long-term hobby.

This strikes me as an extraordinary failure of imagination. There are other communities that have nothing to do with money, and other activities that have nothing to do with work, or sitting at home on the internet.

I'm living in my van currently and once I finish pay off my debts, I'll have few expenses. I spend my time rock climbing and volunteering, and both these have communities around them that I'm deeply connected with. My goals these days are around rock climbing, guitar, and helping underprivileged people in my community gain more agency over their lives. I'm in better shape and eat better than most of my friends who work more than I do.

Sure, doing nothing isn't very enjoyable. So maybe when you quit your job, don't do nothing.

While I haven't fantasized much about that, I'd say the past half decade has been very similar to what you describe.

> I can tell you that for me personally I don't think it was ideal. Yes, at first the freedom is exhilarating, but it doesn't last forever. There were two big problems. One is that you feel disconnected from society. This is hard to explain but being outside of normal social structures you lose a sense of context and meaning to your actions.

Thanks a ton for putting that into words and making me feel less isolated about having similar feelings! In my interactions with family and friends, I often felt guilty somehow about not sharing their day-to-day concerns. I was relatively frugal generally, but I'd just buy whatever I wanted. Going to a supermarket with them was frustrating and somewhat embarrassing, because they'd hunt for the cheap stuff. Or sometimes they'd 'indulge' and their indulgence was something that just wouldn't register for me as anything noteworthy if I'd be shopping by myself.

We'd talk about future prospects (a number of them working in the 'service industry') and I would hide the fact that for me these issues were not on my mind at all. Not because I'm rich by any means, but because I get messages and calls from recruiters on a weekly basis, and could potentially make more in three months than they would in a year.

> Second is that when you don't have any social or financial pressures it's hard to avoid the path of least resistance. It's very easy to fall into bad habits, just watching youtube, reading reddit, bad diet, etc.

My 'saving grace', I suppose, has been a constant desire to keep learning and an anxiety-driven need to 'stay up to date in my field'. But I definitely lost a lot of my 'fire' and self-improvement and goal-setting once I was good enough to just get work without even looking for it.

> I would assess myself as someone who would be less susceptible to these problems. I consider myself a fairly self-motivated person and definitely an introvert. But after several years it starts to weigh on you.

Same here. I've had an unusual life and had an unusual amount of freedom to be an auto-didact and develop skills that will probably allow me to be 'okay' no matter what (barring life's usual curve-balls). As much as I don't want to complain about that luxury, there's a weird feeling of isolation that results from it. A sort of "what's the point when nobody around me shares my (privileged?) concerns?" as well as a sense of "I feel I have an obligation to use this unique privilege for good but I don't know how". In my case, anyways.

> Today I work in an office. There are often times when it's hard and I have to deal with things I don't want to. But I still think it's better than when I wasn't working. I think if I never had the experience of not working I would probably only see the downsides of office life as the upside is quite abstract and hard for me to articulate. I don't think this is something unique to me, I think it's human nature to want social structure and this naturally comes with social obligations. But for most people not being constrained to social structures was never an option anyway so they underestimate how much it affects their happiness.

Not putting your choice down at all; it's often entered my mind, I can't help but feel like somehow that would be a kind of defeat. Sure, lots of it is probably good, but maybe there's a creative way to get all that without the downsides? Is that maybe the challenge to face?

Again, no judgment. I've never been less happy than I've been since I reached my situation of 'freedom' and the guilt over not feeling really happy and content about it. I have often considered just getting a 'regular' job again.

That is what people usually call the law of supply and demand. Your salary is not a function of your skill but of how rare they are on the market relative to the number of job opening.

If you don't have a safety net though, the companies are right, it is better to be underpaid than unemployed (assuming the payment is still higher than any unemployment benefits you can get).

Not saying that’s the truth of the matter, but it’s a perspective you might consider on a case-by-case basis.

>> By 'take advantage' do you mean offering jobs to people who might be interested in accepting them?

>> By 'lock in' do you mean employing people until whenever those people feel like moving on to something else?

If so, those are strange definitions. Doesn't sound like anybody is being forced into anything.

"offered less than what I currently make for part-time"

>> In which case, as a free person, you said 'no,' right?

I had a colleague who complained that he couldn't reasonably be expected to live on his pitiful salary, which turned out to be £80k (about $120k, adjusted for inflation).

Poverty oneupmanship from 1967: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

I'm reasonably sure that's because the gates to third class were locked to keep them off the decks and not because first class passengers were successfully bribing staff to let them onto the life boats. So, for me, it doesn't diminish the power of the scene.

The original piece that this was based upon was written at a time when my bank account was locked up for a month by creditors. I was homeless in downtown San Diego, surrounded by modern wealth, and the only cash I had access to was change found on the street and sidewalk as I walked around during the day.

A similar vignette would be a story I remember reading about a plane crash where they ended up burning large quantities of cash to try to avoid freezing to death in the snow-covered mountains.

I was enduring something extreme. It was a tremendous head fuck and I was doing my best to wrap my mind around it. It wasn't easy to come up with similar examples from literature to which other people might relate at all and people tend to think I'm exaggerating when I talk about the facts of my life. They think I'm being a drama queen to state things that happen to be true for me and try to convey what it's like to experience it.

I remember being in a women's day shelter and someone else who was homeless was waving about a five dollar bill and I had no money and no means to get any money and I don't know how to describe how bizarre that was that even other homeless people were so much more comfortably well off than I was that they didn't feel some need to hide that five dollar bill and protect it from the other poor people around them.

And it's like "Just how can anyone in the US be so extremely cut off from money like that in the midst of so much wealth?" But there I was.

And I'm not the only person who is invisibly cut out. Plenty of people can walk past the table where America lays a feast for some, but not others, and they aren't invited to partake and if they touch it they will go to jail for theft. A lot of those other people are People of Color and they serve the feast, but aren't allowed to eat any of it.

The barriers that keep people out are weird and "magical" in that they are invisible and intangible in certain important ways and they run deep. And all these years later, I still don't know how to speak of it effectively as is clearly demonstrated by the numerous scoffing comments in this very discussion.

"'On 14 April 1912, Benjamin Guggenheim, Solomon’s younger brother, found himself on board the Titanic, and, as the ship started sinking, he was one of those who helped women and children onto the lifeboats, withstanding the frenzy, and at times the brutality, of other male passengers. Then, when his steward was ordered to man one of the boats, Guggenheim took his leave, and asked him to tell his wife that ‘no woman was left on board because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’. And that was it. His words may have been a little less resonant, but it really doesn’t matter; he did the right, very difficult thing to do. And so, when a researcher for Cameron’s 1997 _Titanic_ unearthed the anecdote, he immediately brought it to the scriptwriters’ attention: what a scene. But he was flatly turned down: too unrealistic. The rich don’t die for abstract principles like cowardice and the like. And indeed, the film’s vaguely Guggenheim-like figure tries to force his way onto a lifeboat with a gun.'

Now, here come the interesting questions. When the scriptwriters did rule out the inclusion of this scene, did they do so because they thought the audience would consider it implausible? Because they themselves despised the rich so much that they did not want to concede even one of them the moral high ground? Because they feared their movie would be considered capitalist propaganda, if they included Ben Guggenheim as a hero?"

I wish I could live on the bare minimum and not mind doing things like living off food stamps and clipping coupons, and had a partner in the same mindset. That would open up so many options and increase my runway so much!

But as it is, I’ve never had to go through that and would never want to put my partner through that, so I have to make do with a higher minimum bar

When health concerns start to kick in and your ability to generate income is hampered by the fact that you've decided to pay no attention to your career then that's where the consequences of your decisions start to catch up with you.

It's like those hedonists who choose to spend their life up to their late 20s/early 30s chasing parties while either living off someone else or barely generating any income suddenly need to realize they are powerless to address their basic needs.

Few poor people in the third world would know what blogging even is, forget about even wasting precious resources like time, money for a smartphone and an internet connection just to read/write some ideas which few are ever going to read and you won’t be making anything out of.

This feels like being written by a person who knows that she’s writing for people who like to think about the idea of poverty living, but haven’t experienced it much first or even second-hand, only knowing about it from the news or glossy donation pamphlets.

I'm disabled and the primary provider for my family of three, which includes two disabled sons. I absolutely didn't want to be poor. I'm still poor and I hate every minute of it. I wish desperately that I had more money and I am doing all in my power to resolve my problems and this has been true for years.

"First world problem" or not, being homeless in a first world country is still a very real problem. Among other things, people who are homeless die at much younger ages on average than people who are housed.

People who experience homelessness have an average life expectancy of around 50 years of age, almost 20 years lower than housed populations.

https://nationalhomeless.org/category/mortality/

So homelessness is literally killing people. I do what I can to provide useful information, both for those on the street/at risk of homelessness and for those interested in finding effective solutions. My knowledge comes from first-hand experience -- having spent nearly six years homeless -- as well as formal education on the topic of homelessness.

For the record, I'm a woman. So I'm a "ma'am," not a "sir," if you want to know the correct term with which to express your contempt while pretending to be respectful.

Of course she isn’t talking about solving global poverty, she’s talking about being poor in the USA, with access to services.

If everyone had to constantly preface everything they said with the context within which they were about to say it, that would swiftly get tiring.

That's an incredibly low barrier. Homeless people are merely people without homes. Compare the cost of a smartphone and mobile internet to how much you would have to spend on rent to cease being homeless. Let's be extremely reckless and just get an iPhone Xs plan for $60 per month including 20GB worth of data. Even the most expensive option is basically less than 10% of my rent. It's easy to find a prepaid smartphone for $200-$300 that will be equally useful as the iPhone, last you at least 6 years and you can charge the balance up by going to a retail store where you can simply pay with cash.

Although I agree that literacy is priceless it's probably not 100% required with a modern smartphone. You can probably use voice commands and watch videos and listen to podcasts.

>This doesn't even touch the surface of what real problems most of the world in poor countries face.

Poor countries only have themselves to blame. The real problem they face is primarily the result of government incompetence or corruption and conflicts between countries. In a globalized world prosperity is coming to everyone that is embracing it.

Slums are the result of the poor showing their willpower to pull themselves out of their misery but they are usually prevented by government policy to make their dreams come true. Tent cities in San Francisco are truly worthy of being called slums because their root cause is exactly the same.

I personally think your argumentation is weird. (Don't feel bad about this) You classify homelessness in the US (or any other developed country) as a "First World Problem" because it does not compare to "true poverty" experienced in "truly poor" countries. The implication is that we should be glad that poverty in the US is this "insignificant" but therein lies the paradox. If it's truly insignificant then why should homelessness/poverty as we know it exist at all? People somehow think that the poor should suffer as if they have received a punishment that they badly deserved but yet the poor should also feel good about themselves because it could be even worse. All of this is merely a justification to not help anyone. What you are doing is the same thing you accuse the author of doing. The author isn't thinking about people poorer than her but what about you? Are you thinking about people poorer than you (such as the author)? No, you aren't, not even after reading one article from a poor person.

https://forums.theregister.com/post/search/?q=amanfrommars