What if hard work felt easier?
jeanhsu.substack.com
jeanhsu.substack.com
Not many have the luxury to do what they think makes sense. I've been running my own small business for years. It's lonely to not have coworkers but work is extremely enjoyable.
The author, too, had autonomy but doesn't seem to make a point of that.
The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an individual has.
Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.
The amount of people employed in small businesses or self employed is shrinking and has been for a while. The rules are too complex to start a business. In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on. They extract the value.
To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
Can you expand on this statement? It's a bit ambiguous and I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. Other than that, I agree with your comment.
Even doing independent contracting on the side seems like a minefield w.r.t. quarterly tax payments, estimated tax, etc.. in the US at least. I'm sure I could figure it out but just earning income for some side work seems like a liability and a big headache.
It's really not hard -- it takes maybe 15 minutes per year, and if you own any stocks outside a 401k, you probably already need to make quarterly estimated payments. If it's too much trouble, you can just hire an accountant to take care of it for you. At any rate, it shouldn't be a significant obstacle to contracting.
It takes at least four times that per quarter, really. And especially if you're small enough to not be able to afford an accountant just yet.
That's true, and I do. I guess I'm referring more to the accounting side of it. My brokerage reports/tracks all that for me and hands me a form later. With contracting work, it's all up to you to track and there might be better ways than a text file with some dates and amounts but maybe it really is that simple. I'm not sure.
The lord gives you exactly as much as you need to live but can extract the rest.
This isn't good for anyone as, history tells us, people are less motivated that way.
Anyone using slavery as a metaphor for participating in tech platforms is out of touch with what slavery really is. Nobody is owning you as person and forcing you to work for them without any freedoms because they opened an app store or let you make a Facebook book.
Minimizing the brutality of actual slavery by drawing comparisons to putting apps in app stores (or other tech platform things) is really distasteful
Thanks for providing an example.
A serf also did not feel like a slave, being forced to do things. A serf felt his lord was being generous by letting him use the lord's land, for the low low cost of whatever percentage of his crops, plus being required to go and fight in battle and sometimes die, when there was a battle. Which is oddly analogous to how we feel about tech companies. We don't feel like we're being forced to use e.g. YouTube; we feel Google is being generous by letting us use it, for the low low price of endless advertisements, having our minds altered by propaganda, and randomly getting banned by AI. Although obviously not as much actual death is involved, but then again, Google can unperson you.
Web standards are great. And the web is really something special. No one owns the web. I can publish my own website with a ton of different vendors offering hosting. There's a power law distribution of provider success but it's still a fair game.
App publishing is owned by two companies. Messaging is siloed. Discoverability is pay to play. There is no townsquare not owned.
The way to solve these problems is forcing platforms over a certain size to open their protocols. So We can make on own messaging client that communicates with the gatekeepers. We can offer, without the app stores, our software to their users in the same way that the gatekeepers allow.
Monopolies kill markets. Allowing a fair market on network effect platforms would make the categories competitive. Smaller businesses could compete. The margins would lower for the gatekeepers. The consumers would benefit from lower prices and more innovation.
Most of all, we'd finally be able to reverse the trend of cynical software - 'enshitification' - that comes when a monopoly understands that they no longer need to compete.
And yet anyone can publish a website, like you said. Anyone can create an Instagram or TikTok profile and start selling things. Millions of small businesses do this all the time and grow on these platforms without "pay to play".
> So We can make on own messaging client that communicates with the gatekeepers
What does this have to do with letting people create businesses? Who's going to pay you (one way or another) to use your messaging client to connect to these open services when they can use the official client or anyone else's client?
I think idealists imagine a world where tech giants are forced to open their platforms for free and they can use their own apps to connect to Reddit and YouTube and other platforms while avoiding the ads. It's a pipe dream to imagine that regulators will come in and force businesses to be unprofitable for the good of the public. Platforms need to make money to exist. They can either charge admission or show ads.
There isn't a third option where they're forced to become a public good so that other businesses can freely benefit from their infrastructure.
Not to mention the taxes, depending on where you live. When I actually went to register my side gig wedding photography business it was the most confusing mess I've ever had to slog through.
It's not clear, at all, what licenses you need because of the nature of the business. There's state, then there's also local/city licenses, and it's not clear on if you need one for every city you photograph at, or just one for the city you reside in (your business address). Some cities require it some don't.
Then the taxes here are also just as confusing. Different rates depending on the business activity. Session fee revenue is taxed differently than digital photo sales revenue, etc. Then sometimes the service itself is subject to sales tax, sometimes not, depending on how (and where) you deliver the photos matters too.
You can't be on the legal up and up without hiring an accountant and maybe an attorney to go through the process with you, which is definitely not something I wanted to do for a side gig.
It should not be this convoluted or difficult to legally open a business, especially under a certain amount of revenue per year. I'm not making millions here, we're talking less than 100k/year in gross revenue.
There's a reason most photographers here just....don't bother to register with the dept of revenue. Most don't get caught anyway so a lot of times its worth the risk to just..not pay the taxes.
None of that bureaucracy should exist for businesses under a certain size/under a certain revenue.
I think the trouble you faced, resulted from being at the edge of these kinds of simple systems that do exist -- big enough to need to set up a business, but small enough that hiring an accountant or spending time to familiarize yourself with the legal requirements was out of proportion to the expected revenue. That's unfortunate, of course, but doesn't necessarily reflect on the amount of red tape that exists in general in a country.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/heres-how-to-tell-the-differenc...
[2] https://www.vlaanderen.be/economie-en-ondernemen/een-eigen-z...
[3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-exemp...
Any revenue over $12,000 and you have to register with the Department of Revenue, get a business license, and start paying business and occupation tax and sales taxes (if applicable). If your business is subject to collect sales tax at all, you have to register no matter what your gross revenue is. Unfortunately, the state doesn't have any exemptions for sales tax like the EU.
For some states in the US it is quite a bit simpler, unfortunately for mine it's not and it's like they do everything in their power to prevent small businesses.
> Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.
Modern markets (capitalism) is the direct cause of the problem you describe. And if you think “big organizations” are the problem? The modern market system always tends towards larger corporations since they outcompete the small businesses.
> To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
If this is the egalitarian idea of everyone being closer to a small business owner instead of many smaller businesses but most people still being employees, well that ideal is over a century out of date. It’s dead-end idealism.
In both cases, we need checks and balances to ensure that does not happen.
When it does, that group tends to be weaker for it in the long run so evolution takes its course.
Changing a failing system is very hard. I agree. Maybe it's not possible. But we need to have some vision of a positive future for the negative to not win by default. Cynicism is self-fulfilling.
Democracies tend towards dictatorship? Oh right, most nominal democracies are liberal democracies. Makes sense now.
> Changing a failing system is very hard. I agree. Maybe it's not possible. But we need to have some vision of a positive future for the negative to not win by default. Cynicism is self-fulfilling.
What you need is a better system. Not hopes and prayers.
Strictly speaking, no. A dictatorship takes power away from the people. A democracy sees the people give the power away.
The people don't have to give power away in a democracy, technically, but in practice they always do. Democracy is hard work and people have bigger fish to fry, like keeping food on their table and a roof over their head. For most people it is most sensible to allow a "leader" to take power away from them.
So casually speaking, there isn't a difference. In both cases power isn't in the hands of the people. The reason for why the power isn't held differ, but that is understood to be immaterial with respect the context of discussion.
And the leaders? They do not have these bigger fish to fry?
Is the real reason here that there are regular people and then there are elites? And the difference between these two groups’ capacity to act (power) is so different that the first just has to stay busy staying alive (or rather: deal with all their everyday chores, doesn’t have to be bare survival at all) while the other group has the capacity to wield and exercise power? Then the premise is false: you are not talking about a democracy to begin with.
What didn’t exist cannot be given away.
This. I recently moved from a developer team to a non-dev team. I've written more lines of code in the past month than I had in the last 6 months on the dev team. No vague requirements to deal with. No picky reviews or politics from other devs or TLs. Freedom to write moderately high coverage, fairly robust test suites (compared to minimal coverage with low value checks).
To be fair, this is green field development, so there is a fair amount of easy code and it's not spaghettified yet. However, I am also training non-devs on the team to run an maintain the repo, so there's that.
I think it depends on your position. I've worked for big companies, where my department (and I) had it's own autonomy. Sure, you had to answer to the hire executives at some point, but it wasn't that rigid.
Autonomy is usually earned after years of work, through trust. I know lots of people that basically stop working and try to do nothing, when they are given full autonomy (Many examples of this in the OE subreddit).
I had my own small business for 7 years and am now a consultant. I automatically just get work done without being asked or watched. Most people don't have this mindset and need to be told what to do and monitored.
I really don't think this is the reason. It's easier than ever to start a business now that there are so many free, accessible resources to help you through the process.
There are even services like Stripe Atlas that will walk you through incorporating, getting an EIN, and setting up your billing: https://stripe.com/atlas
The reason few people start businesses is that it's really hard to make a good living. Running your own business is highly risky and takes a lot of work. For every success story there are countless failure stories that people don't speak of.
Being an employee, especially in tech, can be an extraordinarily good deal. It can be frustrating like any job, but predictable pay that comes in well above median compensation for work that poses very little risk to yourself is a luxury. A lot of us have gone back and forth between self-employed and being an employee, and you don't really appreciate how nice it is to get a regular old job doing a narrow piece of work until you've dealt with the stresses of running your own business from top to bottom.
> we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
What does this even mean? Very few business types would even benefit from "forcing" platforms to have open protocols. If regulators came in and forced Facebook or Instagram or even Hacker News to open their protocol and allow other businesses to interoperate (whatever that means) what makes you think individual small businesses would thrive, as opposed to other large companies coming in to take advantage of those forced-open platforms?
Basically, work stops only for food breaks and sleep of about 6 hrs. Ofcourse, this is seasonal, with summers having more free time, due to lack of crop work. But summers would have different types of work such as spinning fiber for cot threads or ropes, mending home roofings, repairing farm tools, carts, fixing irrigation systems, having marriages and festivals etc.
PS: The difference was though winters were "less" work, because everything is under snow. But they're still preparing for future all the time (the huge part of it is logging and wood chopping, which is easier in winter than summer).
There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.
I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.
Yes, there are times when hard work feels great, and it's absolutely worth seeking out this kind of work.
But any serious endeavor is going to have times that are a slog, and your ability to stick with it through the bad times will very directly dictate your ability to get back to the good times.
You misspelled "many" :-)
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build
Well, yes. That's the fun part. The hard part is the "bug fixes on that community library site you built 8 years ago, has 2k loyal users, and will never make you a dime."
This approach, as liberating as it feels, only makes the "who fixes the toilets for the utopia" problem harder.
Having worked across the spectrum of big co. and startups this is much easier to do from a startup/small co. perspective. The larger the company gets the less likely this is going to be the case even for the ones that are more amenable to shifting folks around regularly. The Venn diagram of fulfilling work and the team that you're on gets further spread the larger the company you're on and will change rapidly on you.
Used to happen all the time playing piano in a concert or just an intense practice session. I'd notice that I had been incredibly focused, shockingly focused, like my brain had decided this random sound making activity was its One True Purpose and if it didn't work hard enough it would probably shrivel up and die. And thinking back it hadn't felt strenuous, it felt weirdly calm in the moment, but I think "ease" is totally the wrong word here. It was obvious that I had been working extremely hard, it was as intense as it was calming (? somehow?), and after I'd be totally exhausted.
I think the article really means "what if hard work didn't feel incredibly annoying at the same time?"
On the other hand there's "what if work that feels relaxing isn't also nearly useless"? Because there's a great way to make hard work feel easy, which is to just stop worrying, man. Take it one step at a time, it's probably the right step. There's no rush, slow down, you'll probably get there at the same time as you would by stressing yourself out and stopping for more coffee all the time. Here, use this easy framework...
> I felt like I should catch up to stay relevant in the changing tech landscape, but that feeling just didn’t translate to action.
> Then, a few months ago, I had this silly idea for a Trader Joe’s snack box builder. It made me smile to think about it existing in the world. So I downloaded Cursor, and built and shipped a basic version in two hours.
And what if AI was what made it feel easy?
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build. A few weeks ago, I got pulled into building a Community Library app — something I’d been noodling on for months as a shared Google Sheet. Once I had the idea for a real site, it just made sense to build it.
What if all your problems could be solved with AI? Visualize it. Find that tiny spark of joy. Magnify it.
Well, that's a big question and I think the answer is "no". There's probably not a single person in this world whose entire set of problems could be solved with AI. It can be useful in some narrow (digital) domains, sure. Is it going to fix your grumpy neighbour, your IBS or your Mom with dementia? No.
And in fact, one of my main problems these days is dealing with the side effects of other's over-exuberance with AI. And shockingly, rubbing more AI on it only makes it worse.
This site used to talk all the time about Minimum Viable Products. The focus of startups was to get the MVP out the door so that you could see if there's even a market for it before you invest in further development, scaling, etc. I'm surprised that I haven't seen more posts here specifically about using AI to get an MVP out the door, with the awareness that there will be a lot of human labor down the line.
Some mental work you can just put away, and sleep on, like trying to solve difficult problems. But when you add in time constraint and urgency, that's when things really begin to suck. When I worked in the military I sometimes had double shifts (15-16 hours) where I'd track objects non-stop, doing trying to piece together a puzzle, and update reports on the go. You're so mentally drained afterwards, that you can't do anything but go home and sleep / turn off your brain.
And here's another great one about how ease, and not grind, arguably led to some of the biggest discoveries ever, like General Relativity: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/on-thinkers-and-doers
I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact reasons discussed in the link. It's just a grind pit here. And its harder to swallow this pill when you realize that university campuses are one of the few remaining venues well suited for exploring new ideas and having intellectual serendipity. When you're in a job, you can't easily just find a biology expert or economics expert and chat with them. When students are assaulted with work, they lose the ability to take advantage of that unique quality of the university environment.
I’ve been interested in doing more school as well, but I took a class in-person at a top school and it seems like CS students at least are so career-focused that there’s very little room for curiosity or joy. I guess it’s a big luxury to be a mid-career person doing it mostly out of interest.
I do hope its different elsewhere because to me grad school is something one does if they're not satisfied with their career direction, so in that spirit there should be some exploration built in. CMU doesn't include this at all, so its like paying to work even hard than you would in a normal job. I would very much not recommend coming here for a graduate program.
This is something you might consider checking out, all the work is discretionary by definition, so I assume its more joyful and personal: https://www.recurse.com/. Might be hard to get in, idk.
I don't think the hard part is finding something to do that fulfills you and feels easy. The hard part is meeting your material needs while still having enough time and energy to do that stuff that fulfills you and feels easy.