Not many have the luxury to do what they think makes sense. I've been running my own small business for years. It's lonely to not have coworkers but work is extremely enjoyable.
The author, too, had autonomy but doesn't seem to make a point of that.
The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an individual has.
Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.
The amount of people employed in small businesses or self employed is shrinking and has been for a while. The rules are too complex to start a business. In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on. They extract the value.
To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
Can you expand on this statement? It's a bit ambiguous and I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. Other than that, I agree with your comment.
Even doing independent contracting on the side seems like a minefield w.r.t. quarterly tax payments, estimated tax, etc.. in the US at least. I'm sure I could figure it out but just earning income for some side work seems like a liability and a big headache.
It's really not hard -- it takes maybe 15 minutes per year, and if you own any stocks outside a 401k, you probably already need to make quarterly estimated payments. If it's too much trouble, you can just hire an accountant to take care of it for you. At any rate, it shouldn't be a significant obstacle to contracting.
It takes at least four times that per quarter, really. And especially if you're small enough to not be able to afford an accountant just yet.
That's true, and I do. I guess I'm referring more to the accounting side of it. My brokerage reports/tracks all that for me and hands me a form later. With contracting work, it's all up to you to track and there might be better ways than a text file with some dates and amounts but maybe it really is that simple. I'm not sure.
The lord gives you exactly as much as you need to live but can extract the rest.
This isn't good for anyone as, history tells us, people are less motivated that way.
Web standards are great. And the web is really something special. No one owns the web. I can publish my own website with a ton of different vendors offering hosting. There's a power law distribution of provider success but it's still a fair game.
App publishing is owned by two companies. Messaging is siloed. Discoverability is pay to play. There is no townsquare not owned.
The way to solve these problems is forcing platforms over a certain size to open their protocols. So We can make on own messaging client that communicates with the gatekeepers. We can offer, without the app stores, our software to their users in the same way that the gatekeepers allow.
Monopolies kill markets. Allowing a fair market on network effect platforms would make the categories competitive. Smaller businesses could compete. The margins would lower for the gatekeepers. The consumers would benefit from lower prices and more innovation.
Most of all, we'd finally be able to reverse the trend of cynical software - 'enshitification' - that comes when a monopoly understands that they no longer need to compete.
Not to mention the taxes, depending on where you live. When I actually went to register my side gig wedding photography business it was the most confusing mess I've ever had to slog through.
It's not clear, at all, what licenses you need because of the nature of the business. There's state, then there's also local/city licenses, and it's not clear on if you need one for every city you photograph at, or just one for the city you reside in (your business address). Some cities require it some don't.
Then the taxes here are also just as confusing. Different rates depending on the business activity. Session fee revenue is taxed differently than digital photo sales revenue, etc. Then sometimes the service itself is subject to sales tax, sometimes not, depending on how (and where) you deliver the photos matters too.
You can't be on the legal up and up without hiring an accountant and maybe an attorney to go through the process with you, which is definitely not something I wanted to do for a side gig.
It should not be this convoluted or difficult to legally open a business, especially under a certain amount of revenue per year. I'm not making millions here, we're talking less than 100k/year in gross revenue.
There's a reason most photographers here just....don't bother to register with the dept of revenue. Most don't get caught anyway so a lot of times its worth the risk to just..not pay the taxes.
None of that bureaucracy should exist for businesses under a certain size/under a certain revenue.
I think the trouble you faced, resulted from being at the edge of these kinds of simple systems that do exist -- big enough to need to set up a business, but small enough that hiring an accountant or spending time to familiarize yourself with the legal requirements was out of proportion to the expected revenue. That's unfortunate, of course, but doesn't necessarily reflect on the amount of red tape that exists in general in a country.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/heres-how-to-tell-the-differenc...
[2] https://www.vlaanderen.be/economie-en-ondernemen/een-eigen-z...
[3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-exemp...
Any revenue over $12,000 and you have to register with the Department of Revenue, get a business license, and start paying business and occupation tax and sales taxes (if applicable). If your business is subject to collect sales tax at all, you have to register no matter what your gross revenue is. Unfortunately, the state doesn't have any exemptions for sales tax like the EU.
For some states in the US it is quite a bit simpler, unfortunately for mine it's not and it's like they do everything in their power to prevent small businesses.
> Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.
Modern markets (capitalism) is the direct cause of the problem you describe. And if you think “big organizations” are the problem? The modern market system always tends towards larger corporations since they outcompete the small businesses.
> To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
If this is the egalitarian idea of everyone being closer to a small business owner instead of many smaller businesses but most people still being employees, well that ideal is over a century out of date. It’s dead-end idealism.
In both cases, we need checks and balances to ensure that does not happen.
When it does, that group tends to be weaker for it in the long run so evolution takes its course.
Changing a failing system is very hard. I agree. Maybe it's not possible. But we need to have some vision of a positive future for the negative to not win by default. Cynicism is self-fulfilling.
Democracies tend towards dictatorship? Oh right, most nominal democracies are liberal democracies. Makes sense now.
> Changing a failing system is very hard. I agree. Maybe it's not possible. But we need to have some vision of a positive future for the negative to not win by default. Cynicism is self-fulfilling.
What you need is a better system. Not hopes and prayers.
This. I recently moved from a developer team to a non-dev team. I've written more lines of code in the past month than I had in the last 6 months on the dev team. No vague requirements to deal with. No picky reviews or politics from other devs or TLs. Freedom to write moderately high coverage, fairly robust test suites (compared to minimal coverage with low value checks).
To be fair, this is green field development, so there is a fair amount of easy code and it's not spaghettified yet. However, I am also training non-devs on the team to run an maintain the repo, so there's that.
Having worked across the spectrum of big co. and startups this is much easier to do from a startup/small co. perspective. The larger the company gets the less likely this is going to be the case even for the ones that are more amenable to shifting folks around regularly. The Venn diagram of fulfilling work and the team that you're on gets further spread the larger the company you're on and will change rapidly on you.
And here's another great one about how ease, and not grind, arguably led to some of the biggest discoveries ever, like General Relativity: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/on-thinkers-and-doers
I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact reasons discussed in the link. It's just a grind pit here. And its harder to swallow this pill when you realize that university campuses are one of the few remaining venues well suited for exploring new ideas and having intellectual serendipity. When you're in a job, you can't easily just find a biology expert or economics expert and chat with them. When students are assaulted with work, they lose the ability to take advantage of that unique quality of the university environment.
> I felt like I should catch up to stay relevant in the changing tech landscape, but that feeling just didn’t translate to action.
> Then, a few months ago, I had this silly idea for a Trader Joe’s snack box builder. It made me smile to think about it existing in the world. So I downloaded Cursor, and built and shipped a basic version in two hours.
And what if AI was what made it feel easy?
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build. A few weeks ago, I got pulled into building a Community Library app — something I’d been noodling on for months as a shared Google Sheet. Once I had the idea for a real site, it just made sense to build it.
What if all your problems could be solved with AI? Visualize it. Find that tiny spark of joy. Magnify it.
Well, that's a big question and I think the answer is "no". There's probably not a single person in this world whose entire set of problems could be solved with AI. It can be useful in some narrow (digital) domains, sure. Is it going to fix your grumpy neighbour, your IBS or your Mom with dementia? No.
And in fact, one of my main problems these days is dealing with the side effects of other's over-exuberance with AI. And shockingly, rubbing more AI on it only makes it worse.
I don't think the hard part is finding something to do that fulfills you and feels easy. The hard part is meeting your material needs while still having enough time and energy to do that stuff that fulfills you and feels easy.
Basically, work stops only for food breaks and sleep of about 6 hrs. Ofcourse, this is seasonal, with summers having more free time, due to lack of crop work. But summers would have different types of work such as spinning fiber for cot threads or ropes, mending home roofings, repairing farm tools, carts, fixing irrigation systems, having marriages and festivals etc.
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build
Well, yes. That's the fun part. The hard part is the "bug fixes on that community library site you built 8 years ago, has 2k loyal users, and will never make you a dime."
This approach, as liberating as it feels, only makes the "who fixes the toilets for the utopia" problem harder.
wry_discontent•2h ago
There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.
I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.