When deciding whether to join a company, it may be a good idea to ask to see a video of their annual all hands. Was it an event that you would have enjoyed? Did the people participating appear to have values and attitudes you would like to work with?
have you ever even to an all-hands that wasn't largely vacuous cheerleading? engineering reports great progress. sales reports great traction. admin gives an update of benefits selection and announces training for the new espresso machine. hockey sticks are waved around. new disconnected strategies are unveiled. competitors maligned.
It's a truly interesting quirk of humanity how so many of us (maybe all of us) go through the, "I'm not like the others, I'm different" experience. Maybe that's a lotus he was eating all along.
Well it is pretty common for Millenials as we were literally raised on the "everyone is special, do your passion for work, never work a day in your life, blah de blah" message.
The reality is some people actually are just special. I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace and two other authors recently and it was blatantly obvious within a few minutes that he was just better than them. All three were professional published authors but it was clear who was gifted and who wasn't. I don't know if that means the other two were wasting their time, but it is definitely discouraging to watch as a fairly average person.
Here’s the thing. You can spend your whole life searching the world for Ithaca and you will never find it, you will always have the feeling that something is missing, that you have not yet reached your true destination. All the while, the true Ithaca always was and is within you. When and if a person finally stopped running around and sits down quietly then this Ithaca becomes clear and the lotus eating can be paused or stopped.
This is what so many people miss. You need to be internally motivated to reach your Ithaca. Being externally motivated will make you forever unrequited, forever wondering if what you have reached truly is Ithaca.
"Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean."
>I can hear you, dear reader, muttering to yourself. You think I’m some entitled brat, some tone-deaf pampered prick looking for some way to complain about my incredible good fortune.
Well, yeah, when you act like everyone else is a sheep because they like gasp hot food or dear lord a free sweater, you might come across as a masochistic weirdo. Reminds me a lot of Bottle Rocket or The Comedy.
Is it more entitled to mindlessly indulge in your good fortune and sink into the luxuries that birth have afforded you, or to remain restless and shun easy luxuries as a trap? You could argue that people who are born into situations of privilege have a responsibility to reject an easy life and leverage their security to take the risks that others cannot afford too.
When spurning the luxuries of your birth are you giving them to others? Or are you just spending all those advantages toward a combination of being miserable in your hair shirt while striving for the ultimate entitlement, earning a place in future memory?
Can you really work a 9-5 and still claim that you aren't a lotus eater? Lotus eating isn't endulging in company meals or taking their Ubers, lotus eating is being lured into a sense of security and letting yourself be surrounded by walls of safety to strong for you to break.
I think this is a pretty twisted definition of lotus-eating - in the Odyssey lotus-eating isn't never equated to toiling endlessly on the open sea reaching for a thing that might not be attainable, it's giving up a will to move, eat and simply bask in idle hedonistic pleasure.
So the modern day lotus eater isn't a 9-5 worker, those are the folks on the ships struggling to help fulfill this one dude's hope while being beaten, tempted and killed - and being entirely ignored in the epilogue as if they never even existed... The modern lotus eater is those that sink into depression and drug abuse, able to survive in society but just eeking by while trying to escape reality - And it is certainly good to avoid falling into it.
Same goes the other way, the idea of getting superb freedom and empowerment by running your own company is equally self-delusional. There's cons and pros to both, and they depend on many variables, especially the age and a particular moment in one's life.
The author uses "the lotus" to refer to everyone who is working in tech that isn't running their own start up. By suggestion such people are incapable of introspection, at best you are using that as shortcut to dismiss anyone who isn't a founder as just a sheep.
That's not introspective. That's shallow and condescending, like the author is doing.
I think you've only taken the first level interpretation of what the author wrote and let it hit too close to home.
It's absolutely true that large tech companies throw massive amounts of compensation and perks to lull workers into a sense of security. How do you think people go into Facebook day after day while new stories about their abuses come out?
If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week.
If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.
You say I'm missing the point, but then you go in to literally just agree with me that you are calling everyone in tech a sheep and a drug user. That's intellectually lazy.
> If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week. If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.
the opportunity to be lulled into a false sense of achievement is possible for anyone. keep your own goals in mind and you'll avoid it! I couldn't possibly know about the inner lives of every person in tech, I haven't met and had good conversations with all of them. :)
I’ve met plenty of folks who didn’t routinely reflect on where they were, how they felt about it, etc. juxtaposed against their larger goals. I think setting that regular check in is important I think. Having free will is a burden heh.
I dunno, the guy basically says that several million people are all nothing more than drug users just because they don't want to work in a startup. If that resonates with you, good luck...
It's kind of strange that he takes pride in avoiding free company meals calling them lotus eating. If you were really a practical person wouldn't you just eat the free meal and go back to work? Instead he avoids the free meal and would have to do some other option like making and packing lunch in the morning which takes time, going hungry until he gets home and possibly being hangry toward a coworker, or going outside the building to eat which takes longer and costs more. Instead he turns up his nose to free food so he can brag? How is that helping anyone...
It helps I suppose because we are complex beings that function based on juxtapositions. Anytime a new convenience is added, it eventually stops being a convenience and starts to become a necessity. Free lunches now are just another thing to miss when/if he does launch his own company.
I think his purpose, in his head at least, was to say "don't get comfortable here." That's why he means by "lotus" the entire time -- the perks and luxuries that make you comfortable and unwilling to leave what you've got.
I don't personally agree with his version of Ithaca, and certainly not his condescension towards others, but this part at least seemed self-consistent.
It cannot be to feed their starving employees. If that was the case they would just stop catering and pay their employees more. They're certainly not feeding homeless people in their office.
This food is not a necessity, most certainly not the snacks. These are creature comforts, pieces of corporate flair for recruiters to lure recruits. They're lotuses, to help you feel more comfortable in a place that is not innately comfortable.
Starting your own company is hard and you need industry experience first. Here, the work-life balance is good, the pay is good, the culture is good. What more could you ask for? Plus, have you tried the queijo?
- employees stay on site and so they take shorter lunch breaks
- they are likely to eat with other employees and talk shop
- it does help recruit and keep good employees. If the firm you are thinking of moving to doesn't provide lunch, that's one more friction point: new commute, possibly new schedule, now you have to figure out what you will do for lunch after you have grown accustomed to such an easy solution.
Note how that last point seems to resonate closely with the author's point since his Ithaca is apparently about leaving your job and starting a startup... or something? It's not clear what his Ithaca is.
His skipping lunch is an exercise in asceticism that I think he is hoping will serve some higher purpose later. But at the end of the day I think he's just not satisfied where he is and would rather work somewhere else. Other than "moving to San Francisco" he doesn't mention any job changes. So I think that's his problem. And if you're not happy somewhere, free lunch is not going to stop you from leaving.
I think he intends for you to think he’s a fool for turning down the meals. I think part of the point of the article is that some people think that by avoiding “vices” they are avoiding complacency, when really avoiding those everyday things is a way of telling yourself that you’re perusing a higher goal even though you’re not.
This smells like projecting values on others. Just because the author's Ithaca includes building an independent company doesn't mean that others are lotus eaters. If the author's co-workers had explicit goals of contributing to a large company, having a happy, stable family and good work-life balance, etc. then perhaps they already found their Ithaca.
I agree building a company just for the sake of building a company is as arbitrary and meaningless of an Ithaca as it is to want to work for say Google. However contributing in a meaningful way to improving the world is a noble pursuit and we need more people doing that not less. Whether we are already at max-capacity of useful contributing people is another question. Maybe the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn't have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family.
Everybody has to find their own path I guess. Also 99.99% of people don't care about improving the world and the world gets by just fine on its own. Or does it (global warming, war, etc.)? Who knows, who cares.
“the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn’t have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family” is one of the most condescending things I’ve read in a long time. Even for hacker news.
You ever watch that South Park episode where they make fun of Hollywood where all the actors love the smell of their own farts? These days I feel that this is a pretty apt of a criticism of SV and Bay Area culture..
How is that condescending? sub "frontend for Google AdWords" with "plumber, truck driver, etc." Not everybody has the skills, motivation, luck, to be working on problems that push the human race forward. So what? People should still be content. I would argue that we programmers are some of the most delusional about what our jobs really accomplish, and who they really help. The person making 500k at Twitter thinks they have the skills to make the world a better place, but do they? Probably not. And who cares?
> Maybe the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn't have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family.
Whose definition of "better" are we required to use? I strongly suspect yours, mine, and the person building front ends for Google AdWords will be different definitions.
Exactly my point. Curing cancer is a more noble pursuit and a hell of a lot harder work and higher skilled than javascript programming. Somehow we programmers think knowing how to reverse a linkedlist and get hired by a FAANG automatically puts us in the upper echelons of engineers. Just because you make a lot of money in software doesn't mean you know how to actually build things that help people.
I think that some primal instinct gets triggered when you are building your own thing.
Hundreds of thousands of people use the product I helped build at my current workplace and I don't feel a thing. Yet having even a 100 daily users show up at the website I used to run felt exhilarating.
Quit your job and start something and holy shit you will come to realize the lotus is even more extreme than you thought. The worst is finding out how many, or probably most, raise their pre-seed entirely on connections, the ones you don't end up building at the companies you work for. So you end up an actually broke start up founder, realize the meritocracy is only for the poor souls who have to succeed based on their own merits, and that you might not stand a chance braving the startup seas. Talking to your friends who are employees will dial up the dissonance to 11...the myths they believe about founding startups and fundraising, what they've 'learned' from podcasts and blog posts about startups; anything less than over the top enthusiasm for the risk you take will shock you to your core. It's fucking hard.
The weird thing for me is how trapped I felt by my vest dates before leaving the comfort of a well-funded business. I could afford vacations and clothes I wanted, if I waited long enough and kept getting promoted I could eventually buy an overpriced but lovely home in the Bay Area somewhere but I'd never have enough money to really live free.
Do I regret leaving to start a company and ultimately fail? No. I used to be poor and I got used to being poor again. Leaving the island was awful however: paying for food and healthcare again, an inability to enjoy the myriad distractions of the bay. I might never be able to afford a home of my own but I'm lucky that my wife is an artist and is happy to entertain the struggle as well. I'm actually on company number two but this time with some funding.
It's a hero's journey, like the odyssey or wandering the desert. I somehow have found peace with all this; the debt, the fear, the stress. The journey itself is the reward even if it is a bitter one.
What I'm saying is, if you get the sense you don't want to be a lotus eater in Silicon Valley, say fuck it and pull the plug. You'll grow some scars, it will absolutely suck (even my peers who did YC feel this way), but you'll feel some kind of cosmic satisfaction with your path like Odysseus.
And if you don't gain that peace, you can always get another job :)
That's the vibe I get too since the author is also the submitter of the article but isn't engaging in the comments that I see.
And being able to mooch off your friends' apartment and crash on their couch so you don't need to worry about finding a place to live seems pretty lotusee-eater to me, but what do I know.
I’m surprised so many people are taking this at face value. It’s satire, right? This bit leans into it hard:
> If it was raining, obviously, I couldn’t reasonably be expected to ride my bike. Or in the winter months when it’s a bit dark in the mornings, or when it got too cold, or when I was just a bit too tired. Let’s be reasonable here.
I guess it’s satirizing people who carve out tiny pockets of differentiation from others then mentally inflate it into some kind of deep uniqueness.
To be fair we are reaching a point where the lines between satire and reality are starting to blur a bit. I hope this is satire, but I'm not 100% sure.
The article is essentially the author's reflection on how they difficult it is to retain their drive in a context where the perks of their success can easily sap it away. I call that pretty clear eyed. It is much harder to step off that island than ever to get on to it. On the other hand, the illusions of Ithaca, can be equally pernicious. You may find, in the end, that no matter what, the Ithaca you desired is always out of reach, and was never real anyway, and fill your heart with regret and bitterness.
Big D said it: The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity. (;
I don't know if this is just a satire or just someone who sees themself as a mastermind just expecting some taps on the back for their supposed enlightenment. Pure bs.
111 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadThe reality is some people actually are just special. I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace and two other authors recently and it was blatantly obvious within a few minutes that he was just better than them. All three were professional published authors but it was clear who was gifted and who wasn't. I don't know if that means the other two were wasting their time, but it is definitely discouraging to watch as a fairly average person.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3qjCvkQWvs
This is what so many people miss. You need to be internally motivated to reach your Ithaca. Being externally motivated will make you forever unrequited, forever wondering if what you have reached truly is Ithaca.
See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef...
"Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean."
By C. P. Cavafy
Well, yeah, when you act like everyone else is a sheep because they like gasp hot food or dear lord a free sweater, you might come across as a masochistic weirdo. Reminds me a lot of Bottle Rocket or The Comedy.
So the modern day lotus eater isn't a 9-5 worker, those are the folks on the ships struggling to help fulfill this one dude's hope while being beaten, tempted and killed - and being entirely ignored in the epilogue as if they never even existed... The modern lotus eater is those that sink into depression and drug abuse, able to survive in society but just eeking by while trying to escape reality - And it is certainly good to avoid falling into it.
That's not introspective. That's shallow and condescending, like the author is doing.
It's absolutely true that large tech companies throw massive amounts of compensation and perks to lull workers into a sense of security. How do you think people go into Facebook day after day while new stories about their abuses come out?
If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week.
If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.
> If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week. If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.
the opportunity to be lulled into a false sense of achievement is possible for anyone. keep your own goals in mind and you'll avoid it! I couldn't possibly know about the inner lives of every person in tech, I haven't met and had good conversations with all of them. :)
Expect to get negative feedback and insults from the people who want praise for not trying to achieve anything great.
Experience with a real lotus might, I think, engender a useful readjustment of priors, eh?
I don't personally agree with his version of Ithaca, and certainly not his condescension towards others, but this part at least seemed self-consistent.
What is the purpose of this free food?
It cannot be to feed their starving employees. If that was the case they would just stop catering and pay their employees more. They're certainly not feeding homeless people in their office.
This food is not a necessity, most certainly not the snacks. These are creature comforts, pieces of corporate flair for recruiters to lure recruits. They're lotuses, to help you feel more comfortable in a place that is not innately comfortable.
Starting your own company is hard and you need industry experience first. Here, the work-life balance is good, the pay is good, the culture is good. What more could you ask for? Plus, have you tried the queijo?
- employees stay on site and so they take shorter lunch breaks
- they are likely to eat with other employees and talk shop
- it does help recruit and keep good employees. If the firm you are thinking of moving to doesn't provide lunch, that's one more friction point: new commute, possibly new schedule, now you have to figure out what you will do for lunch after you have grown accustomed to such an easy solution.
Note how that last point seems to resonate closely with the author's point since his Ithaca is apparently about leaving your job and starting a startup... or something? It's not clear what his Ithaca is.
His skipping lunch is an exercise in asceticism that I think he is hoping will serve some higher purpose later. But at the end of the day I think he's just not satisfied where he is and would rather work somewhere else. Other than "moving to San Francisco" he doesn't mention any job changes. So I think that's his problem. And if you're not happy somewhere, free lunch is not going to stop you from leaving.
Everybody has to find their own path I guess. Also 99.99% of people don't care about improving the world and the world gets by just fine on its own. Or does it (global warming, war, etc.)? Who knows, who cares.
You ever watch that South Park episode where they make fun of Hollywood where all the actors love the smell of their own farts? These days I feel that this is a pretty apt of a criticism of SV and Bay Area culture..
Whose definition of "better" are we required to use? I strongly suspect yours, mine, and the person building front ends for Google AdWords will be different definitions.
Hundreds of thousands of people use the product I helped build at my current workplace and I don't feel a thing. Yet having even a 100 daily users show up at the website I used to run felt exhilarating.
The weird thing for me is how trapped I felt by my vest dates before leaving the comfort of a well-funded business. I could afford vacations and clothes I wanted, if I waited long enough and kept getting promoted I could eventually buy an overpriced but lovely home in the Bay Area somewhere but I'd never have enough money to really live free.
Do I regret leaving to start a company and ultimately fail? No. I used to be poor and I got used to being poor again. Leaving the island was awful however: paying for food and healthcare again, an inability to enjoy the myriad distractions of the bay. I might never be able to afford a home of my own but I'm lucky that my wife is an artist and is happy to entertain the struggle as well. I'm actually on company number two but this time with some funding.
It's a hero's journey, like the odyssey or wandering the desert. I somehow have found peace with all this; the debt, the fear, the stress. The journey itself is the reward even if it is a bitter one.
What I'm saying is, if you get the sense you don't want to be a lotus eater in Silicon Valley, say fuck it and pull the plug. You'll grow some scars, it will absolutely suck (even my peers who did YC feel this way), but you'll feel some kind of cosmic satisfaction with your path like Odysseus.
And if you don't gain that peace, you can always get another job :)
https://xkcd.com/610/
And being able to mooch off your friends' apartment and crash on their couch so you don't need to worry about finding a place to live seems pretty lotusee-eater to me, but what do I know.
> If it was raining, obviously, I couldn’t reasonably be expected to ride my bike. Or in the winter months when it’s a bit dark in the mornings, or when it got too cold, or when I was just a bit too tired. Let’s be reasonable here.
I guess it’s satirizing people who carve out tiny pockets of differentiation from others then mentally inflate it into some kind of deep uniqueness.
“I was in the throes of a lotus dream”
Big D said it: The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity. (;
Author goes on about how pampering yourself with comfort is imprisonment, but also says this? cmon.