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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment

Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old college educated Americans I see constantly complaining about "living wages" and the like

The cases where I've spent time with people like this, I generally find that they spend a lot of money on alcohol/drugs and work very little or not at all

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> Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time.

Because it was an immigration policy that selected for that Pakistani gentleman to be in your general vicinity at that moment. But it was something more akin to Math.rand() that chose the American.

If your purpose were to post the same complaint about someone drawn at random from Pakistan, you could try using Math.rand() to pick (on) one of them, too.

Well, if you grew up with a certain standard of living and you went off and did the right things and studied the right subjects and got the good jobs - only to find out you cannot achieve anything close to what your parents and grandparents have l, there is a certain part of you that’s going to be resentful and hurt and angry.

As others have said “Happiness = Reality - Expectations.”

For the Pakistani or Mexican man coming from poverty stricken, crime riddled, violent places in the world to America that’s a major step up in quality of life. Whereas I, an American, making $150k per year as a software engineer literally cannot afford a house within two counties of my mother because the costs of housing in those areas are so sky high that I would have to squeeze my wife and three children into a small 2/2 condo in a rough part of town. This would effectively revert me back to the standard of living my poor immigrant grandparents had when they came to America.

In any case I work remote and instead live in a reasonable home in a moderate income area instead so I’m just fine. But that right there is a large part of modern generational bitterness among the youth. Even those that on paper have made it often haven’t.

Reading your comment as a foreigner is crazy - I don't even claim to understand half of your situation. What is so bad about living in another county? Did your county look like it does now when your parents bought property there? Maybe back in the day, they would've rather lived somewhere else and couldn't afford it?

You make enough money to afford rent on a small villa in very livable parts of the United States - the richest nation on earth - as far as I an tell. How can you, or anyone else, be bitter about such a situation?

> How can you, or anyone else, be bitter about such a situation?

They're not bitter about the situation.

They're bitter about the degradation of their situation relative to their parents' or grandparents' situations.

It's good you put "poor" in scare quotes. The truly poor are not complaining online all the time because they don't have the time and/or money to be bitching online. You seemed to have missed one of the primary points of the article.

No I agree with that point in the article. The people I meet who complain are not standing in line at the food bank

I've seen the sentiment several times right here on HN that $250k is "basically poverty" in San Francisco. It's unbelievable to me how out of touch and spoiled one would have to be to reach that conclusion.

To my ears that just sounds like a mind trick.

If you convince yourselves $250k is practically nothing, you might be able to psychologically push yourself that extra bit harder to get to $500k.

But if you look around and say "Gee, objectively speaking I am one of the richest people who has ever lived" you might be inclined to actually enjoy that money, which involves spending more time enjoying the money and less time working, which lowers your chances of eventually getting to $500k.

I imagine similar strats are employed by relative high earners in e.g. Albania, trying to go from $25k to $50k, or Pakistan trying to go from $2.5k to $5.0k.

Because humans compare against their previous situation. If humans don't advance against their previous situation and against their peers, even very slowly is enough but if they don't, best of luck motivating them to do anything.

Happiness = reality - expectations

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