Friendly reminder that being able to pack up and take a sabbatical year off is still privilege. If you can't just get up and leave to enjoy your good days, don't blame yourself. Most people can't.
The guy worked hard and earned his year off, don’t dismiss it by calling it privilege. He has the skills and intelligence and hard working habits to earn the year off, this is not privilege. Successful people aren’t successful because of privilege, that’s just a label for an excuse by those who aren’t successful. You get what you earn in life.
No, because this is privilege. To be born in a rich country. To have family structure to study and go to college, to have a stable job and a successful career after graduation. To be lucky enough to choose a career that is in demand. Or to open a business that is successful.
People underestimate A LOT how much of a role luck plays in successful careers. Sure hard work is necessary, but you can very well burn out and still be unsuccessful.
If you can't see this, maybe this is your privilege that is blinding you from what most people go through in life.
Luck is something that happens to a lot of people, including the unsuccessful ones, but few of us, successful or not, are willing to admit that we burnt some chance, or several of them. It is easier to blame someone else or something else (absence of necessary luck) for unsatisfactory results. It is easier to attribute certain satisfactory results in other people to their luck, without discussing the effort necessary to exploit that luck or even recognize a lucky set of circumstances and act on them (because these tend to be fleeting).
We are more of a rationalizing species than a rational one, and we are really good at framing things in a way that strokes our egos.
Being smart sometimes has downsides, eg existential crises etc
Life is not fair.
I mean, your statement “To be lucky enough to choose a career that is in demand” just misses the mark so entirely. There’s NO LUCK INVOLVED!! People on HN didn’t pick their major/hobby out of a hat. The picked tech because they love it and it pays well, and they have the intelligence to do it well. If someone chooses to be a street musician, they can’t blame “privilege” when they can’t take a year off.
“maybe this is your privilege that is blinding you” - no, maybe your rose colored glasses are blinding you here. Not everyone can take a year off, the world is unfair, and some people will live better lives than others. Deal with it.
I think "rose colored glasses" may not be the expression you were looking for. The person you are replying to is not ignoring inequity, they are acknowledging it. Sure people will always live better lives than others, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work towards a more fair world.
Recognizing that the playing field isn't level, and that outcomes aren't controlled only by the amount of hard work you put in makes it easier to push towards a better world.
I don't know about you but it was certainly luck for me. I was lucky to be born where, when, and to whom. Tweak any of those variables a bit and I'd be in a completely different career. A few hundred miles east and I'd be living on a farm instead of a suburb of Big Tech City. A decade prior and I wouldn't have had access to computers in school. Different parents and I might not have had the same encouragement to get into tech. It's an incredible amount of luck when you actually think about it and don't just jerk your knee when someone uses the term privilege.
This is literally what privilege means. It's not an insult.
There are literally millions of people who deserve / have "earned" this privilege, but aren't given it. The word lucky comes to mind.
To take an extreme example: how hard do the children of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, etc have to work to "earn" their fortunes and success?
I wish there were words to convince you of how profoundly incorrect you are about this.
Unfortunately, it will probably require years and pain instead. Maybe your own pain, or if you're more fortunate you will develop empathy for others.
In the meantime, some people say that reading Ayn Rand helps -- after the initial rush of affirmation, you grow to realize that she's just another writer of superhero comics. As that slowly percolates into your awareness, you start to understand humans and society are really quite complicated things, which can help you become a more tolerant person.