Cope culture. Doctors make a lot of money, and that is fine | Hacker News Reader

Cope culture. Doctors make a lot of money, and that is fine

greyenlightenment.com

26 pointspaulpauper16 comments

> I am ignoring food, phone, car, rent and discretionary expenses, as these expenses tend to be constant or not mandatory. It’s not like only high earners need to commute to work, need shelter, healthcare, or phone plans, or have families, in which having more money can only help. And it’s not like these expenses scale with income, unlike taxes.

Author doesn't understand lifestyle inflation (and how insidious it can creep up on you)

The author mentions it twice, I think the author gets it.

But it's a choice, at least if you're aware of it.

> As shown by the many posts on ‘FIRE’ or investing Reddit communities of salaried people making millions–it is indeed possible to get rich working for someone else. These are young and middle-aged people on Reddit who have homes, nest eggs, a good work-life balance, and a high standard of living despite working for someone else, yet are somehow ‘doing it wrong’ or are struggling or miserable according to the Twitter or hustle-culture narrative. Hell, even Steve Balmer became richer than Bill Gates despite working for him.

The last sentence in this paragraph doesn't make sense.

Isn't Bill Gates less rich because he's actively giving it away through philanthropy?

No, not really. Gates is less rich because he sold his MSFT, while Ballmer kept it. This had much more significant impact than all of his philanthropy.

i.e. a classic case of forgoing potential returns in exchange for portfolio diversity and reduced risk.

He sold his MSFT to spend the money on philantrophy.

He didn't, he donated much less than he had msft stock

From someone who currently has seven figure TC and is about to FIRE into the sunset by EOY in order to downshift (leaving millions in unvested stock grants on the table): such comp and work life balance are basically incompatible. When you’re young and poor, that’s fine, but I’m neither. Any claims to the contrary would need some serious evidence. This is so for rather fundamental reasons: comp like this requires serious results, and serious results are very difficult to achieve in large organizations. And only large companies are willing to pay this much.

> such comp and work life balance are basically incompatible. > comp like this requires serious results

there is diminishing return in results once you shift from good work/life balance schedule. Say you work 8h/d and deliver results with value of 500K/y. You won't be able to bump delivered value to 1M if work 12h/d, you will burn faster. At this level of compensation you are selling your skills and talent, and not overtime.

You usually don’t have the option to modulate this. It’s my second such position and neither one had the option of anything other than high stress, and near-burnout work intensity on highly ambiguous, organizationally and technically complex problems. If they could hire someone for less to do what I do, they would. On the positive side I no longer want to climb the ladder. The higher up you go the worse this gets, and I don’t think it’s worth it, not even for a “life changing” amount of money.

stress is your internal state, and is optional.

Work intensity is result of you not saying no. I still believe if your employer pays you 7 digits for 12h/d, he will pay you about the same for 8h/d which will bring total -20% delivered value reduction (reduced work time, but improved burnout damage).

What's your TC? :-)

not 7 digits. But I observe some 7 digit people. They do well pretending being busy though, but it is not relevant to value they deliver.

Good luck! If you are anything like me, it may take six months just to feel human again.

There is very little I miss about working, and that is mainly getting to talk to really smart people. There is also a sense of loss for the person that you used to be --a high achiever--, and a growing acceptance of the person you are now --a retiree--.

I’m 18 months into my FIRE and I STILL struggle with not being that high achiever and taking it easy.

Whenever I hear the personal story of someone who's dumped large amount into the absolutely most bullsh*t scammy cryptocurrency there is always some element of "I heard about Bitcoin in XXX and didn't buy any / got it scammed / sold it right away, and now I'm going to make up for it!"

Spoiler: they usually don't. Many end up in a spiral of buying in to increasingly implausible risk-on choices in an effort to recover their prior losses (which is increasingly difficult and so requires greater returns) and repeated cycles of buy high/sell low.

This is in contrast to people who merely find some crypto thing useful or are interested in investing in it on the basis of some beliefs about it and don't feel like they've already missed out on anything. They too may lose money, but if they appear to lose less, manage the losses better, and they tend to fall for impossible schemes or outright scams less often.

It seems like the specific goal of offsetting a perceived loss is significantly worse than other goals even just a simple "I want to make lots of money".

I wonder if the same thing goes for entrepreneurs too-- do people who feel the pain of missing out on a big tech corp paycheck or surgeon pay tend to go for less plausible businesses?

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