HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

I'll give you mine perspective where I happen to completely be the opposite of you.

> Given my income and my economic situation I shouldn't feel anxious, yet I can't relax thinking every hour spent watching netflix is in a way costing me ~110$.

I make about $3000 net per month. I work 4 days per week. Currently working remote, I'm also currently single (since very recent). I'm in another country. I take long walks, I meet people, I chill hardcore, it's nice. I spend about $2500 by not even thinking about money and making very unoptimized decisions. The way I view it, life is good, especially because the place I work for also provides a pension and there is a small state pension. If the market goes completely sideways, I'm a software developer! I'll get by. I'll teach high schoolers math (or any other subject) if I have to.

My life feels like a vacation. I need the 4 day work week in order to stay mentally sharp. I don't want to mentally decline, it's a health thing. I happen to make money with it as well. I don't fully like doing it (software engineering), but I don't hate it either. IMO that's the sweet spot, it constantly reminds me to have something of a work ethic. Quite frankly, I love the whole situation.

> So when I don't have any more work for the week, I work on my hard and soft skills through certifications so I can up even more my hourly rate.

I also work on my soft skills! I do it through dating. I meet people while sitting remote working in a cafe, or when I go on my daily walks. People come from all walks of life. I guess you learn totally different soft skills though ;-)

Hard skills? I learn it when the time requires me to. I've seen so many languages, while there's a lot to learn for me, there is at the same time nothing new under the sun. When I started out in my computer science bachelor it felt I was too stupid. I had a very hard time wrapping my head around programming. I've never had those difficulties since, learning stuff now simply takes time.

How can I live like this you might ask? Well, it's better for me to be chill than to be all riled up. I provide a bigger benefit by being relaxed, positive and helpful to other people. I know the world is falling apart (just a bit, not too much IMO, read Factfulness, it's written by a Norwegian economist, he has an awesome ted talk too [1]).

I agree to a large extent with the rest, can't provide a counter point to that. Feel free to email me if you want someone to talk to, as a curious fellow HN'er that is :)

Email is in my profile.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...

> Every population that grows exponentially will double over a period of time.

And ~10 billion is where humans will stop growing (at least, will stop growing exponentially/explosively). IIRC this is mentioned in this talk by Hans Rosling: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...

⬐ developer93

Trouble is, that peak number keeps going up. I remember learning in school that it was 8 billion, now it's 10. You have to look over time, in 10 years it might 11, but yeah we're definitely going to peak any time now. An-ny time now. And even if/when we do, having more old people than young will cause a load of other problems which we don't seem to be preparing for. Most economies seem to be built (to my inexpert eye) on having more net producers (workers) than net consumers (pensioners, kids, sick people, unemployed). It needs to change.

⬐ dmitriid

> Trouble is, that peak number keeps going up.

It might. But it's nowhere exponential, or even linear.

⬐ oblio

You need to dig deeper. More and more countries are slowing down. That growth left is in a smaller and smaller number of countries.

Which makes it, cynically, sustainable. When every country is growing out of a control, that's a worldwide disaster. When a bunch of countries are growing out of control... that's a local disaster. There's a reason we have countries/states/defense mechanisms.

⬐ 29athrowaway

It doesn't matter.

1. The net world population is going up. Any non-zero growth rate will eventually saturate the planet.

2. We are already beyond capacity. Even if we kept the current population level for 100 years, we would still run out of resources.

3. The countries that slow down their growth tend to get more economically developed, causing each person to boost their resource consumption.

In 4-2-1 families (Chinese one child policy), the one remaining person consumes far more resources than the 6 ancestors combined.

⬐ dmitriid

> The net world population is going up. Any non-zero growth rate will eventually saturate the planet.

There's a huge difference between "saturating" 10 years from now or 1000 years from now.

And population growth has slowed down to a crawl. It's enough to bring just a dozen, or less, countries out of poverty to achieve basically zero growth.

> We are already beyond capacity.

We are not.

> causing each person to boost their resource consumption.

Overconsumption is a problem, and should definitely be solved.

⬐ 29athrowaway

I don't have to prove you wrong, reality will.

The chart of popularity on GitHub vs stack overflow would be awesome if animated showing movement over time.

I am thinking of the super-popular gap minder demos at TED by Hans Rosling. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve... etc

Reminds me of Hans Rosling's talks, for example https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve....