Ask HN: How do I cope knowing people make more than me on onlyfans?

It'll probably help to think longer term.

Your education/interviews/early career are adding value to your skills and remuneration, if you follow the most typical paths, each year you will make more money than the previous year - occasionally in small payrises, sometimes in big steps as you shift jobs to better ones thanks to the experience/skills/network you gained in earlier roles. This will mostly "just happen" unless you fuckup or sabotage it big time. It'll be the assumed progression for you by your managers, recruiters, lenders, partners, "the world".

Your cousin does not have that. In five years, you'll be well on your way to her $10k/month, if not beyond already. And you'll be wondering to yourself "are they gonna try and stiff me with just a single digit percent payrise here, cause I have a bunch of recruiter calls I'll letting go to voicemail I could start picking up on.." What's your cousin going to do when her admittedly valuable youthful beauty inevitably wanes? What's her $10k/month Instagram influencer income going to look like when she's 25? Or 35? or 50?

Be happy for her that she's taking advantage of what she's got. Be generous with any advice you can offer her about planning for her future, when some new pretty young things come up underneath her and leave her wondering where all that money went...

Assuming this post is genuine,

Coping is an interesting word choice. It hints at perceived wrong.

Internalizing an injustice can force one to confront morality.

It is complicated. I only want to present a different case.

There was a recent report on charges against a sex-trafficking ring where the victims were "rescued"... but later were re-victimized. Turns out the undercover officers in the investigation reportedly had paid and participated in sexual acts with the victims which eventually lead to a dismissal of charges due to entrampment laws.

1. Decisions matter in this sense.

2. Consequences are often not directly measurable

(Does sexual freedom come with hidden costs to us, such as porn addiction effects, prevalence of STDs, etc?) (Is supporting abortion or 'reproductive rights' of disadvantaged groups different from genocide?) (A recent example: does the positive of lives saved by the pandemic lockdown balance with the negatives of its economic impact?)

3. An easy answer is not in my HN comment.

Assuming she's using the site to make money how most people use Onlyfans, She probably has at most 10 years to make money that way.

Most adult industry workers burn out quickly and move on to other things. But if your cousin manages to stay in the industry for even 10 years and still keep making more money that way (or if she uses the money she made through onlyfans and moves on to make more money through other means), then she probably deserves it since it's not easy to pull off.

Assuming you make money with your brain, you probably have decades ahead of you. Plus, you can expand your horizon (for making money) in various ways, while your cousin probably has only one way to make money which depends heavily on looks, which is a depreciating asset.

How do you cope knowing that people inherit money from their parents?

How do you cope knowing that people win the lottery?

How do you cope knowing that janitors often work harder than landlords?

Onlyfans will commoditize what your cousin is selling in short order, just like early adopters on Uber, Airbnb, Ebay, etc...the laws of supply and demand will only allow this to last a couple years, tops! Then what will she have learned and what skills and experiences will she have to be ready for the following two years? What skills and experiences will you have at that time? Easy come, easy go.

Also, "depressed," is different than, "discouraged." Careful of your word choice and make sure you are labeling your emotions correctly.

What about people born with a $100M trust fund?

Comparing yourself to others or seeing the world as a meritocracy is always an exercise that will make you upset. There is always someone luckier than you.

Remember that your cousin likely won't want to do this forever, and she'll end up far behind in the job world. She's sprinting and you're running marathon.

You put in 1% the effort of waiters, janitors, high school teachers, fishermen, kids working at the age of 9 so their family can eat at night. Pardon me if I'm not crying over a stem major making a couple less grand than they think they deserve.

A few angles:

1) Somebody wise once said: "Only look in another persons bowl to see if they have enough to eat." Not doing this will cause you to ruminate on all kinds of people's wins at life. In turn, this will cause you, over time, to actually be "depressed" which I don't think you mean to say.

2) She has strengths\talents x and y. You have strengths\talents a and b. She uses hers wisely to make $. Use yours wisely and build something that will stand the test of time way past her ability to use her strengths.

3) She's family. Help each other out. If she's making only $10k a month, why not help her somehow make more? Maybe what you build can help her do just that.

What is your cousin's onlyfans account? You know.. for um.. research..

You’ll never have the worries about your potential future children’s friends finding out about your stint in porn and torturing your offspring with that knowledge

You went to college for computer science, something you perceived would make you prestigious. Someone in a field of work that you look down on makes more.

You don’t need to cope with anything, you need to learn to check your own ego and not judge other people.

Don't look at others, just look at yourselve.

How do you think rich people cope with a friend earning more. They don't, since they ( mostly) don't care. As long as we both are good off, it's good for our friendship.

Balancing a friendship between poor/rich is much more difficult/fragile because of possible jealousy. When you are in the same boat ( eg. We are both doing fine), it's much easier and it's insane how easier friendships become, just because of that "simple" thing.

You can’t internalize that you don’t have to sexually whore yourself out to strangers?

No one looks at that kind of stuff and goes ‘that’s inspiring, I aspire towards that’.

It’s the same for drug dealing. This is uninspiring, shameful stuff.

OnlyFans is a temporary fad that will quickly go away as more people start doing it. It used to be that in the early days of YouTube you could make insane levels of money just by playing games. The same applies to Twitch and the live-streaming services, or even drop-shipping Chinese goods with social media advertising. All the success you see on these platforms is because the creators are exploiting a temporary gap in the market - more demand than supply - but little actual skill is involved and the market will re-adjust as more people start doing it (because very little skill is involved so pretty much anyone can do it).

You already went to university, so you get nothing for second-guessing how you might have spent the time. You should concern yourself with what to do going forward.

You make it sound like you can still do the onlyfans thing. If so, nothing prevents you. You can do it as a side job/gig and stack up twice the cash. I'd guess that if you seriously consider it, you will find that you don't actually want that and you have probably gotten envious over something you don't actually even want. You see easy money, but you haven't factored in the opportunity cost and probable hit to self-respect. You might endanger your current career by getting found out, and your current career should probably last longer.

Really, I think the whole thing should evaporate if you think about it all and understand it. As mentioned elsewhere, most people don't want to get to your cousin's position, they find themselves there for lack of options, lack of discipline, lack of understanding consequences, etc.