Hacker News Reader

Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

I just recently started a 32 hour a week salaried job. Here’s my story.

I was at a very good job. My ultimate goal is to just go to the beach and not work at all. I realized that’s too big of a leap, so I set a shorter term more realistic goal of working 4 days a week.

My employer at the time rejected the idea, so instead of ignoring recruiters like usual, I answered them. If a job wasn’t immoral, the interview process wasn’t arduous, and I felt I could do the job, I went through with interviews in good faith.

Every time I did this, I got to the offer phase. With nothing to lose, at that moment I asked to work four days a week. I didn’t demand it. I just asked for it. I think I even said the exact words “I know you’ll probably say no to this, but I want to work four days a week.”

One place made an offer that wasn’t better enough compared to my existing job. I didn’t accept and moved on.

Eventually a place made an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have been here almost two months. Have yet to work on a Friday. I’m actually working harder than ever on Monday through Thursday. I am motivated to make this last, because honestly it is just as fantastic as I imagined. My life is so good right now despite the world being terrible.

My new salary is higher as well.

View on HN

Context: I do recruiting as a team lead. I am happy you found what you were looking for. But from my pov, if you want to work less than fulltime and thats a non negotiable thing for you, please be open up front with the people who interview you. Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours, thats another topic). I was several times in the position where a candidate suddenly said, that he wants to work part time (at the last stage of the hiring process). By doing this he wasted not only mine but also his own time..

What if I'm confident that I can convince you my 32 hrs are worth just as much or even more than s.o. else's 40 hrs though?

I as an applicant would also not want to be ruled out only based on that, I would want to have a chance to present my own full offer to you as well.

It's not a "chance to present my own full offer" when the role explicitly states full-time. That's called trying to re-negotiate and it's not great. Also, there's no way I'll let you convince me of formally hiring you at 32 hours because of the hassles involved on my side, and more importantly the slippery slope - say the next guy thinks he can do it in 16 hours, the next person is remote, the next person doesn't want to join Zoom calls because they're more effective async, another want to only work at night when they're "in the zone".. not everything is up for negotiation (even though in reality, you should try and have flexibility in the roles in day-to-day practice because we're all unique humans and stuff comes up etc. but you get my point). I think people in tech have gotten a bit precious and spoiled TBH :)

I think it's employers who've gotten a bit precious and spoiled, if they're so reluctant to consider the needs and desires of their employees.

I think all of those requests are reasonable.

Allowing someone to work the hours that they work most efficiently in increases productivity.

Everyone knows that meetings are a waste of time and lead to poorly thought out solutions.

Asynchronous communication is more efficient AND gives better results.

Both of these things are objectively good for the company, and a company which sees that will outperform a company that doesn’t.

Nobody wants to work 5 days a week. Most people just put up with it. The company doesn’t really have a way to measure productivity so they just say more hours worked = more hours produced. But we all know this relationship is not linear.

I know anecdotally that my productivity is vastly higher when working fewer hours.

I have had times where I get more work done in 4 days than I did in 5 days. That isn’t always going to be the case. But if the company is paying you 80% salary then the company is definitely getting more work out of you per unit salary, and that’s all that really matters in the end.

I do agree that modern work is quite broken and there's times we are more productive in shorter amounts of time. I don't think it's the "time" that determines it though but rather the nature of work and whether it motivates us and is in the perfect balance of flow etc. etc.

And good meetings are good meetings. That said, 2/3 meetings are considered "unnecessary" in surveys we did - so it's a matter of killing off the waste-of-time meetings and doing that async and using tech, and using the more synchronous ways of working for things that needs that (specific real-time collaborative work)

Ok, I believe you. Your 32 hours are just as productive as an "average" developer's 40 hours.

and what if I can convince you that at our company, people with your level of talent set the bar?

We pay above market rate because we are looking for 40 hours of above average talent, which is equivalent to 55 hours of normal talent.

> Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours, thats another topic)

But that is the point.

If someone believes they can do a full-time workload in 4 days, how else should they approach this in a way that works?

Put another way: How many employers, do you estimate, would not even do an interview with someone if they knew they wanted to do 4 days? How would you, as a recruiter, figure out a candidate is capable of that? How would you pitch them candidate to an employer looking for full-time?

I don't see what GP did as much different than how most recruitment processes work from the hiring side. You usually don't find out:

  - salary
  - stock options
  - contractual terms, like non-competes 
  - etc

until you have cleared their hiring bars first.

I'd love to see full transparency on both sides, but until we do I don't think they did anything wrong, and in fact just applied the same approach used by many companies, waiting until they were committed before making their big ask.

Absolutely not. There are certain questions you can’t ask until after you have an offer because they will otherwise unfairly shade people’s perception of you. This is no different than waiting a few dates before disclosing medical issues and such to a potential mate. Convince people of your value first, then hit them with the conditions.

This isn’t a flaw to be fixed. It’s just how human interactions work. It has always been this way and always will be, no matter what you try to do about it.

If he had been up front his his ambition to work 4 days a week then he wouldn't have made it to interview at most of the places he did, let alone to offer stage.

Telling a recruiter things you'd like usually leads to them telling you to fuck off, so this advice is very good for getting zero jobs. If you get through a whole interview process (i.e. you like them) and the fact that they don't want to sit in your (virtual) office for five days a week is still a complete deal breaker you have a poor process. If you feel like that realisation wastes your time, I think you have some growth to do as a team lead.

Actually telling things you like is a good thing. Why would it be a bad thing? Getting zero job offers is mostly, at least from my experience, a result of lacking the needed soft or hard skills (sadly errors can occure here - false negatives) or someone who doesnt meet organizational requirements (like the things we discussed here). In my process I tell in the first contact, that I am looking to fill a full time position in my team. If the candidate neither at the end of this call or in the organzation process for the second meeting says, that working full time is not an option, well sorry, thats just unfair. My opinion.

Telling this first is a good way to have every company think that 5 days/week is an organizational requirement and brush off the candidate. Having the candidate wait until after the interview puts them in a much stronger negotiating position, namely it forces the company to assess whether or not 5 days a week is a legitimate requirement or not. Many parts of the interview process are unfair to candidates, such as not advertising salary ranges in advance, forcing candidates to take vacation time to attend interviews, etc. This is merely a way to balance the scales away from the company, which generally holds almost all of the power in a negotiation, especially at the start, before an offer is made.

Ironically I think this attitude is what encourages the bait-and-switch scenario. If someone tells you before interviews they want to work 4 days, 100% chance they'll be rejected. But if a perfect candidate gets to the final stage and then tells you they will only work 4 days the odds are much better and the leverage is on their side.

Also there isn't really part time / full time with salaried work. I doubt you're paying overtime if someone stays in the office for over 40 hours. Hiring for presence over productivity doesn't seem like a good metric.

"Please be an easier mark for me."

Yeah, and potentially the 3-5 other people who interviewed them as well! That would get me a bit fired up if they didn't ask me that until the end of the process.. as bad as when people tell me they want a remote role when it's clearly advertised as an in-city office-first role!

Do you tell them the salary and % of the company they’ll get up front?

% in company not a thing here. I ask for a salary range from the candidate. If that meets the range I can potentially offer, I say so. If it is too high, I also say so. If it is lower than usual and it is a final match, our offer will be higher. If the candidate "refuses" to name it (acutally didnt happend in the last years) I can only assume that I would say my budget. Guess its fair or what would you say?

Yeah, that’s fair. It’s very common that candidates get surprised on the downside at the end of the process, though, so I think it’s generally fair for the candidate to hold back some information until you’re sold on them. Though it’d be nice if they didn’t have to.

Instead of asking for range from them, why not tell them your budget first? Or at least both write them down on pieces of paper and reveal simultaneously.

99% of candidates come through some 3rd party recruiter (in our case). They know our ranges and communicate this. The other 1%, well I just dont do, no special thoughts. Its not in my intention to push compensation down. This only has future downsides if I hire the candidate and he performs well.

I'm usually upfront with my demand to work 4 days. I share it with them as soon as I know their basics like the location and the pay range.

In the last two years I've been committing just 16-24 hours/week of actual sit-down-at-desk work to the projects/contracts I've worked on. Despite not working 40 hours, I hit all my deliverables and leave my clients very happy. No secret sauce - I just focus on getting deliverables done and religiously avoid "stuff-and-fluff".

That to say; recruiters, team leads et al have little idea of how workload converts to time. If you're measuring hours you've already lost. The only thing that matters is output value.

> Michael Scott: Jim Halpert: Not a hard worker. I can spend all day on a project, and he will finish the same project in a half an hour.

To be fair, most employers include a lot of things in their job ads that shouldn't necessarily be taken literally or in the strictest sense possible. For example, a decent chunk of ads I've seen ask for a set of qualifications that would leave them with zero applicants if taken literally. I've also heard from multiple hiring managers and recruiters that "if you're not qualified but you really want to job, you should apply anyway".

Applying for a "full time" job, if you expect to be able to handle a "full time workload" is not a great stretch.

Also, as several other commenters have pointed out, employers routinely leave a lot of critical details out in the early stages — especially details that might make applicants not bother applying at all. Unless you're very clearly a rare exception to that norm (i.e. an applicant can tell that easily from the job ad) then it's a bit rich to expect applicants to lay everything on the table before you've even met.

Why can't you just make more clear in the beginning that this position is full-time and only full-time and that (for what ever reason) you are not able to consider part time workers for this job?

There is an information asymmetry. People want to disclose things that make them less attractive to employ as late as possible. Similarly there are things you don't tell the candidate beforehand too.

> Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed

Yet when there is demand from prospective employees for something that is not offered (4 day week) but known to exist if you ask later in the interview process with some companies people will have to try if you are some company. Whether you are offering reduced time jobs or not for some positions that is available is an information you hold. You do not seem to want to hold that information back so you can make a decision depending on the candidate so you should very visibly perform send a costly signal that makes it clear reduced work hours are not possible. A costly signal would be "we are not able to consider non full-time applicants for this position".

I did not think this gets so much attention. A lot of the points you all wrote are correct. But still, if I am looking to fil a full time position (of course this is written in the ad...) and you dont want to work full time than this is totally fine but not a match. Maybe you think you can convince a company that you can generate the same output as other employees who work full time - and maybe that is true. But its insanely hard to do so. To this day (at least in germany in most companies I know) people are just not ready yet to admid that working time != working results. Just the turh for now (I myself hope too that this will change and I do my bits). And by the way I would assume that a lot of people who are active here are above average in there profession. I dont have proof for that but thats what I think. And guess what: a lot of candidates are not above average.

I consider the hours worked as part of compensation. It's something to be discussed during the negotiation phase. The company decides the structure of the hiring process. If you don't want to waste time, nothing stops you from moving the negotiation phase to the very start of the hiring process. I would personally prefer it if you did that as well. As an applicant it seems very awkward and unprofessional to come in and try to negotiate right from the start unless the company makes it clear that is what they want.

I work as a developer, and recruiters emails me in a daily basis. We all should try to minimize the recruiting efforts, but the amount of secrets that recruiters won't tell is just annoying... Sometimes even the company name they're recruiting for is a secret until you pass 1 or 2 interviews.

I know, there must be reasons for that, but from my point of view, it makes me lost a lot of time, and just for context, I spend 3 months looking for a job (with several interviews each week), this is just the proper market research everyone should do. And the end I was able to double my salary, work less, and get a lot bunch of great benefits.

And of course, the most annoying thing from this, was all the wasted time because recruiters 1) didn't wanted to handle me the proper information (like salary ranges or benefits) and 2) recruiters didn't make their own job, there was like 3-4 companies I applied for where, at the end of the process they wanted to hire me, but we're not able to do it since they have a contract with my previous company. Recruiters (or somebody else) should check that info before starting the process.

Unfortunately you're in the minority in my experience. Maybe your colleagues and yourself all act in good faith during negotiations, but they are no longer the majority in a large part of the industry. Many recruiters don't act in good faith with candidates these days, especially as KPI's are getting stretched and firms are starting to close out their recruiting efforts.

For candidates who have this as a dealbreaker with a hard-sell like this, I have one suggestion: Don't tell them it's a deal-breaker, just say you're looking at another offer with this perk and see what they can do. That way it doesn't look like you're gaming their hiring process, nor that you were interviewing in bad faith.

>Eventually a place made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Well... it's better than sleeping with the fishes :) JK JK

Thanks for the write up!

Well, I do now feel like I owe my employer a huge favor XD.

That’s the secret. More employers would benefit from recognizing it.

Glad it worked out.

For anyone else thinking of doing this I’d recommend asking for this up front. If a company isn’t open to it, then they’re not going to be later on after you’ve both invested all that time.

This is amazing, good for you!

Do you mind sharing your job, how long the process took/how many different companies you interviewed?

I'm a software engineer. I'm working at a startup now after basically refusing to work at start-ups, or any kind of tech company, my entire career prior. I always worked at normal stable trustworthy non-tech companies that happened to need software engineers. I would still prefer to go back to the non-tech non-startup industry, but the offer was too good.

The process took less than a year. I entertained pitches from many many recruiters. I can't even remember how many. Most of them I rejected immediately because the jobs were beneath my high moral standard. I had introductory interviews at maybe 10-ish places. I actually went through the full interview process at only 3 places.

I was able to do all this purely because my existing job was stable and excellent. I would go back to it in a heartbeat if necessary. I was negotiating from a position of extreme strength with absolutely nothing to lose if the prospective new employer said no. I'm honestly afraid of a situation where I have no job and have to accept the first offer I can get. I might end up in a spiral of changing jobs frequently while trying to get back to a place that I find acceptable.

> Most of them I rejected immediately because the jobs were beneath my high moral standard.

Earlier you mentioned

> Eventually a place made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Did you need to sacrifice morals for this offer? Or is there some other reason you took the offer?

It sounds like he only applied and went through the interview process for jobs that already passed his “high moral standard”

Such standards necessarily may become more flexible as we head into a recession...

I did not need to sacrifice my moral standards for this current job. If that was the case, I would not have accepted for any realistic amount. However, if you ignore the compensation, which includes the reduced working hours, I must admit I would give a slight edge to my previous job just out of personal preference.

> I would still prefer to go back to the non-tech non-startup industry.

As someone who has spent > 15 years in the tech-only industry, both in massive corporations and startups, I'm curious to know how someone finds these roles. I think I'd quite like something like this when I am ready to move on from my current (startup) role.

You find them by applying to non-tech companies that are large :)

Ex-colleague of mine was interviewed by big pharma for ML roles.

I live in NYC. NYC has a lot of companies in various industries such as entertainment, fashion, finance, advertising, etc. Some of those industries I refuse to work in, like finance and advertising, but you may find them acceptable. All of them have computers and software engineers because it's the year 2022. At bare minimum, those companies are buying SaaS products, but they still need experts to glue the APIs together with their internal systems. You get those jobs the same way you get any other job. Applying or being recruited.

LOL, it generally takes me going through at least a dozen interview processes to both:

1) get to the offer phase

2) get an offer that isn't a lowball

4 x 10 hours or 4 x 8?

32 hours so 4x8

This is an important distinction, but personally I think I prefer 4x10 over 5x8.

Productivity will probably be better too.

This is anecdotal, so not data, but I'm not 100% sure i agree. But it may be an age thing.

In my youth (for some definition of youth) I could work flat out for 10 hours+. I'd get in the groove and just fly.

I'm a little (or lot) older now - and I can do maybe 6 hours at a time now. I now fill the rest of the time with non-code work, like docs etc. Or I just knock off early.

If I have a solo code task, I can do a 10 hour day without feeling burned out. But a day of randomizations, collaboration and firefighting, I feel done after 6 heh.

I have 30 hours workweek and work 5x6, for the last 7 years. I also negotiated that I can leave at noon, and work the remaining hours, from where ever I am, when there is need (e.g. when I need to answer crucial things at evenings, weekends etc., which happens maybe once in a month). It is very good, I can spend more time with my son. I can go running when there is still sunlight outside. The problem is I could not go back to an 8 hour day.

I don't abuse this deal: When I really want to get things finished, or when there's something critical, of course it happens that I am still at work Friday 4PM. It works the other way, too: When there's something critical at home (and no planned interaction at work), I may not show up at all, and it is Ok.

I'm a bit surprised more employers don't offer this. It seems like a very good way to retain talent especially as it becomes harder to find experienced software engineers for the same low salaries.

> I don't abuse this deal: When I really want to get things finished, or when there's something critical, of course it happens

That's the thing - if you respect your employees, they'll respect you.

Member of my team moved recently to 4x9.375 instead of 5x7.5. My company wouldn't allow an hours reduction at the same or similar salary, so he took the offered option above. He takes Wednesday off and seems to enjoy it. I'm considering the same now, too.

Yes, it’s 4x8.

I think this generalizes:

Engineers right now are negotiating from a place of power when it comes to employment. It's just that for whatever reason, our current employer at any given time usually struggles to see that. So we can ask for things and very well might get them (whether that's compensation, work-schedule, or something else), but we're going to have much better luck doing that at the time of getting a new offer (while still employed). That's where our negotiating power comes into focus for the other party.

For you it was a four-day work week, for me it was getting them to drop the overbearing inventions-ownership clause in my contract. But I think that, if there's anything important missing on a person's work-life wishlist, this is the way to go about getting it.

You wouldn’t get tired of the beach if you went every day?

No, I could spend all day at the beach for the rest of my life. Same with hiking desert climates. Same with spending all my time in my wood and metal shop.

Absolutely not. I would live in a beach house, and I would indeed spend many hours laying in the sand, swimming in the ocean, etc. But I wouldn't literally spend the entire rest of my life doing nothing else at all. There would be socializing with friends and family, traveling, and taking care of my affairs. I would also spend plenty of time on hobbies of all sorts.

The key is that I would be living a life of complete and total leisure. Wake up whenever I want. Sleep whenever I want. Eat whenever I want. And each day, each moment, I would do whatever in particular I happened to feel like doing. I would not spend one moment of my remaining short life doing something purely because a capitalist system forced me to do so. That's the ultimate, probably unachievable, goal.

> The key is that I would be living a life of complete and total leisure. Wake up whenever I want. Sleep whenever I want. Eat whenever I want. And each day, each moment, I would do whatever in particular I happened to feel like doing.

I ended up in essentially this state for several years. It was about as blissful as you would imagine. The problem is, what got me in to that state was an intense drive (among other things) that becomes increasingly hard to sate without a meaningful purpose.

So I've voluntarily made my way back into "capitalist systems" and have to consciously remind myself that it is optional and a choice I've made. It's hard to find lasting contentment.

Any tips?

So this life of total leisure is the thing we all want, and it is for that reason the capitalist system seems to work. Someone has to provide the labor that allows you to continue in a life of leisure.

Society doesn't require many people to work to sustain itself (we have the recent example of the pandemic). If we could enjoy for a while what we have built until this current moment, without inventing or creating anything new, how much time will it take for society to collapse?

Animals live a life of leisure without much work, and they don't have the infrastructure that we as humans have. They don't collapse.

How much work is essential in a society? Medical, agriculture, logistics? If we stopped creating new hardware or software for a few years, how much impact will that have on society? I would want to run a test to see the results.

If our ancestors thought this way, we would be living in much worse conditions now. Even if your goal is to maximize your own happiness, you will find that humans are happiest when they move towards some important goal they set out for themselves. Ever tried playing a video game with cheats? It's fun for about 10 minutes. Then it becomes extremely boring and meaningless. I'm sure there are ways in which hedonists can to some degree overcome this(rotating between different hobbies, doing drugs, immersing themselves in fictional worlds etc.) but this isn't even sacrificing the future for the present, it's just sacrificing both.

> Animals live a life of leisure without much work, and they don't have the infrastructure that we as humans have. They don't collapse.

^ This claim doesn't really sound like it has a lot of evidence to back it up.

As i see this problem I can break it down in 2 parts: - systems (including animals & humans) evolve or decline - our species doesn't have a central decision system

So, as I see it, animals live a life of constant pressure where the strong survive and the weak are culled out. No judgement here on the implications of striving for strength.

Suppose humans stop advancing our way to creating supporting tools that enable our weak to live. In my view this means those tools will decline and tend to disappear. Thus as a species we would be heading to the type of life animals live - I described above.

So, I argue that all work is essential work because when the outskirts of the bell curve of essential work are cut off, then the height of the bell curve drops as well.

> systems (including animals & humans) evolve or decline

This is not necessarily true. We could maintain systems without evolution or decline. For example, I don't think that cloth manufacturing has evolved much since the 70s. Shops have new ways to sell (via the internet), but we as a society could wear clothes from the 70s and have the same quality of life (in terms of clothing) as people back then. Think about how much unnecessary work and waste have we created by consuming clothes every year. How much damage could be avoided by not manufacturing more clothes?

> So, as I see it, animals live a life of constant pressure where the strong survive and the weak are culled out

Animals have the pressure to eat. They hunt, they consume what they need, and they rest until they are hungry again. They aren't constantly accumulating food or killing other species. That's the difference between animals and humans. The fisherman goes fishing every single day from 9 to 5, no matter if society is hungry or not.

I think in some sense it feels like we want to live off the fat of the land so to speak.

And this totally doable, and I think a lot of people could live in leisure for quite a while.

At some point though unless we live much more nomadically and never storing up for the future, we will need to make sacrifices in life again for some higher goal, to those who come after us in order to once again have the fat of the land.

This is just the way of life though.

Fuck yeah.

With you all the way in this, including the probably unachievable part. starts to shed a tear

That's not capitalism to blame, that's just the free market.

I'm not sure any system will let you live this life without a significant investment back into it, first.

Well if anything a post-scarcity system would do it.

It's an interesting idea that's fairly new to me. I guess I don't have enough communist friends. :)

It sounds nice, but will never happen on a global scale IMO because people will always fight for positions of power. Complete freedom/autonomy/no agency is not what a government wants of its citizens.

So if there was some kinda revolution, sure, but I speculate it would be quite isolated.

Post scarcity is more likened to the SciFi utopia of star trek, but yes :)

>> I would not spend one moment of my remaining short life doing something purely because a capitalist system forced me to do so. That's the ultimate, probably unachievable, goal.

Given your profession, a capitalist society is by far the most likely way for you to get what you want. What do socialist-type EU countries pay software engineers again compared to the United States? How much money do you need to save to achieve your dream? The US is without question the best country to chase that goal.

Statistically the US is also the best country to end up destitute, homeless and harassed by the police regularly. Plus - what are "socialist-type EU countries"?

>> Statistically the US is also the best country to end up destitute, homeless and harassed by the police regularly.

The first two points are false, I could present to you high double-digit countries where it's much worse than the United States. Charitably though, I assume you mean non-developing nations, in which case, you have a point.

It also does not apply to the parent poster.

Unlike the two people who replied to you, I would 100% get tired of the beach within... 2 hours.

A tiny anecdote just so you know the other extreme exists. I've lived very close to a beach (200 metres or so) for about 1.5 years and never got tired of the beach. Barring day where I was unwell or out of town, I went for a walk or a swim every single day. All my current career goals are centered around eventually settling down near a beach!

This july I tried one month of living close to the beach, in a rental apartment. I took half of the time off, and the rest of the time I worked from “home”. I went to the beach every day, and plenty of days I went all day.

By the end of the month I got tired of sitting on the beach.

My MiL’s place is a few minutes from the beach. When we visit, I mostly use it for nighttime walks. I would go crazy spending every day on the beach.

But boy is it great for a stroll with ice cream on a hot summer night.

I would. Also my skin burns in like 15 minutes, so I'd have to wear a burqa or something. But I imagine OP doesn't mean literally being on the beach all the time. Just have leisure time that you can structure as you like. I could probably last a year or two like that if I didn't have to work. Or maybe I'd find a project or several to work on anyway, just not as employment.

Speaking from experience, no.

> My life is so good right now despite the world being terrible.

The world is overwhelmingly amazing, not terrible.

For the majority of people this is one of the best times to be alive in all of human history. Rivaled only by the years prior to the pandemic.

War, Deglobalization, Climate Change, Resource scarcity, Economic bubbles.

What the fuck are you on about, the world is olympic diving into the garbage heap.

Edit: If you downvote, please have the decency to explain your reasoning. Are you saying this opinion is incorrect? Why? It is to my understanding a race against time, when concerning climate change alone. One we are losing. Do you just dislike hearing about it?

As if none of that existed in the past?

Are you of a differing opinion? If so, I am desperate for some hope.

Take a look at https://www.humanprogress.org

Many of the issues that seem like doom and gloom will be solved, through human ingenuity and perseverance. Getting all bent out of shape and depressed is not the answer as the truth is that all those things aren’t nearly as bad as many are making them out to be. Your understanding of climate change is severely limited, and yes your opinion is thoroughly unfounded when you look at the full picture.

The current wars are barely a blip compared to wars in years past.

Deglobalization at the scale it’s happening is a good thing so I’m not sure why you’re upset about it. The scale at which we were doing it was unsustainable and was causing more harm than good in the more recent past.

Resource scarcity is something people like to cry wolf about but never actually comes to pass.

Economic bubbles have existed for millennia and aren’t new or that scary.

The pandemic is still ongoing, plenty of countries still enforce masks.

Inflation is indirectly taxing people more and more and our society is going to hell because wealthy people brainwash people and destroy families.

Governments all around the world are becoming closer and closer to China every day.

Sure, we may have more technology nowadays (thanks capitalism) - but frankly I would have preferred being born in the 50s.

The world is objectively a shitty, awful place for billions of people.

When in history has that not been true?

Before about 1800, when the world didn't have billions of people? And who knows how shitty it really did feel for most people throughout history, when they had little else to compare against.

...according to your subjective value system.

In the greater scheme of things, you’re probably right. On the other hand, 2019 was the last “normal” year we will experience for a very long time. That doesn’t feel good.

Just change your standard of normal? Those bland boring years before 2020 in which nothing bad ever happened.

GP didn’t say that the world is terrible because it is comparatively worse than it used to be, that would be a different statement. “Terrible” is not an objectively quantifiable adjective subject to factual policing.

For example, one person can say “The world is terrible because fascism is on the rise in many countries.” Another person pointing out that polio infection rates are very low does not cancel out the first statement. Everybody gets to have a subjective opinion!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com