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Comment by bonplan23 | Hacker News Reader

>just don't want to do that....

Nobody ever said that life is fair. Whether you still persist and find happiness typically depends on your willingness to adapt and evolve.

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I think you are mistaking 'happiness' with 'employment' here. The leather worker may adapt to the new environment to become a factory site manager. But there's no guarantee that this leads to happiness.

Also you should bear in mind, adaptation is a young man's game. Retraining is possible, but companies typically don't hire trainees in their 40s/50s, so your willingness may not be the deciding factor. My dad ended up as a postal worker when he left his career as a humanities academic at 55, no highly skilled jobs would take him (he did prefer it though haha).

If I try to think of my grandparents and older generations, it just feels extremely out of touch to even associate work and happiness conceptually. They worked what they could to sustain their families. They were happy from seeing their children well fed, not from how the job felt.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an interview of Bernard Arnault who said "I work, but in the same time I have fun, this allow to work a lot without too much suffering". I was raise in the environment you describe and could never understand as a kid why people working in fancy job would not retire when given the choice, politicians are a fine example of those, well past retirement age but staying when everyone in my family would go on retirement the second they were given the chance since work was associated with pain, and the only thing that can explain that gap is the happiness factor

well, this is what happens as people move up the needs later (as ted kaczynski said) - they turn to other activities outside of basic survival for fulfillment.

And of course in a society based on protestant capitalism, it's clear why work and happiness and work are so strongly coupled. I'm sure things are different in most of europe.

But again, academia and math are things people only do because they really love doing them and can't imagine doing anything else all day.

“He who would live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has no right to exist.”

I'll leave looking up the authorship of the quote as an exercise for your LLM-fu.

thanks, now I'm probably on a list

Sounds like Hitler but am not going to look it up.

I wonder how the humankind is supposed to avoid repeating the history if it's afraid to look at it?

Someone is very interested in averting people from knowing it in detail, and most people play along self-censoring.

I didn't want to look it up because it is more interesting in engaging with other people. If I looked it up I would immediately know if I was right or wrong and wouldn't have even bothered looking at your reply.

I agree with you it is worth looking at history.

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