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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you have created a distance between yourself and people who make less money. You think your being smarter makes you different. You experience discomfort when dealing with "them" as if they are not people just like yourself, and talk about "different social classes" as if that is anything more than a social construct.

Honestly, step one is to stop segregating people in your mind, and just look at them as people just like yourself. Then you could actually get to know them and find out if their work makes them happy, whether it is just a job or something they are passionate about. You likely will find people who are satisfied with life at almost all wealth levels, just like you find people who are miserable at all wealth levels.

I'd recommend that you step back from your desire to avoid all discomfort, and instead step out of your comfort zone, explore the diversity this world has to offer, and get to know more people.

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Is this a GPT-3 generated post? It reads like an answer to a completely different different question that just happens to hit the same keywords (e.g. "pay", "smart", "comfort", "social class"...)

I think it's real and it makes sense. Look at the post. It reads borderline iamverysmart. He says people who work way harder making making less money but clearly has something going on with his own brain to assume that. I know someone whose worked hard their entire life and they run a small CNC shop. They're a multi millionaire. I know people who are software developers who bust their ass 12-16 hours a day for half of my own salary at the same company. The OPs issue is 100% their own issue and they have to work through it. Superiority complex is strong.

It's easy to find counter-examples of both non-technologists who who work hard and are rich and people, and technologists who work hard and are poor, but that doesn't disprove that there are, as OP observed, a huge segment people in society who do work much harder and are paid much less than your typical technologist.

Years ago I did an internship in an emergency room to gain a certain medical qualification, and there I saw first hand people who worked much, much harder than I for much less pay. And they are saving lives while I write useless enterprise bloatware. Feeling that there might be something wrong with this dynamic is not a sign of a superiority complex, it's a sign of empathy and humility.

That the root comment was a GPT-3 generated post was the most charitable interpretation. The other is that it's some kind of flamebait.

> You might say I "deserve" my current place in life. Nothing has been handed to me, and I'm unusually smart and hard working. But I believe that I was born smart, and I've always had a compulsion to work hard.

> I feel uncomfortable interacting with people of lower social classes.

I think these are the parts that one might read less as "a sign of empathy and humility", and skew more towards "superiority".

People who are known for their aptitude for empathy and humility are more likely to see people as individuals (rather than placing them into bins such as "people of lower social class"), and less likely to assume that their personal life experience is comprehensive enough to make definitive-sounding statements on pretty subjective matters (such as classifying themselves as "unusually smart", where "smart" is a contentious thing to quantify at the best of times, or saying "nothing has been handed to me", when it's rather likely they're the beneficiary of at least some amount of privilege). I think this is what codingdave is referring to.

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