Hath smaller fleas that on him prey
Aug. 31st, 2025 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: venting, (arguably) poverty]
They say there is a bug in human psychology, that causes their emotions to respond to slightly negative expected-value bets as if they were slightly positive.
I never claimed to be human.
---
Consider a thought experiment.
Pay $50. Roll a die. On 1 - 5, get nothing back. On 6, get $400.
When contemplating this scenario, two things become rapidly apparent:
1. If you do this a dozen times a day for months on end, you will make a shitload of money.
2. The vast majority of the *individual experiences* you have during this process will be "the experience of having just lost $50".
---
(With a little more contemplation, one also notices:
Over time, there are very likely to be entire days when all 12 of the dice roll losing numbers. There will plausibly be net-negative *months*.
(This is especially true in a slightly less simplified toy model, where some of the dice are d10s or 15s or 20s, with correspondingly higher payouts.))
---
You *can* make mid-five-digits a year, it turns out. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. Without passing as allistic to a job interviewer. Without having done a summer internship in the summer of *2020*. Without being able to casually lift 50lb objects (and God help you if you ever happen to get a minor muscle injury, one that wouldn't have fazed a computer-toucher or even burger-flipper).
You can do it working from home! Working ~20-hour weeks!
There's just one catch:
You have to endure near-constant, false negative feedback from actions that actually *were* worth doing.
---
(Well, okay, not *just* one catch.
That 20-hour workweek? It's not four fives. It's not five fours. It's seven not-quite-threes.
You *could* take a day off. No one would stop you, nor actively punish you (and how many jobs can say that?). But it wouldn't *work*, knowing just how many strands of safety net you sacrificed in exchange for it.
(On average. How many strands of safety net you sacrificed *on average*. It *could* turn out to be one of the days when all the dice roll 1 - 5, and you'd have been better off staying home (metaphorically speaking). But you can't know that in advance.))
---
Where have I been, these past few months?
I've been forcing myself into a shape that can endure near-constant losses, with occasional breaks in the stream that do not *viscerally* feel like they make up for it even while an *objective* graph of my net worth over time looks like *this*:
A shape like that is not good for writing in, and it is *especially* not good at editing drafts and determining whether and at what point to publish them (this would require taking emotional feedback into account! something that is normally a very bad idea!).
It's not good for playing, either.
---
(I think the worst part is that it *isn't* 20 hours a week. That's roughly what I'm *doing*, at the moment, but I *could* be doing more. There are so, so many gambling operations in Ontario, and *some* of them are not edible but lots of them are. Never mind twelve Things: I can't fully do any *one* Thing.
(also, I convinced the restaurant gig to drop me from three nights a week to two, but did not go to zero: the diversification is nice, and anyway it is extremely useful to be Legibly Employed. (for one thing, what are you supposed to say during Know Your Customer when a casino asks where you got your money from? "it's the blood I sucked out of your brethren"? they'd ban you immediately!) but this makes for very long workdays, on those two days a week.often even as long as a normal person's workday, the kind they do 5 of every week)
It would be easier if I could simply set up the promotions for the day and then be Done, or even just Done With That.
...this implies that I would psychologically benefit from having *fewer* opportunities, all else equal. Which is objectively stupid, but I suppose that's emotions for you.)
---
At this savings rate, it would take me roughly nine years to become financially independent.
The thing is: I don't have nine years of this. Plausibly nobody has nine more years at their jobs in which to save up, but I sure as hell don't. It'll likely wither away within the next couple of years, sort of like how one can no longer easily fund an entire Disney World vacation by doing surveys and clicks on the Internet for a year. (Not to even mention that a couple of the many Ontarian sportsbooks and casinos have caught on and banned me, and presumably more will follow in time.)
(Though to be fair, AI is *not* what will disrupt this. "Having a legal human identity" is an explicit requirement: some people, who are not good with spreadsheets and calculators and reading fine print, actually specialise in selling access to their legal human identities to [people who *are* good at spreadsheets and calculators and reading fine print] in exchange for a cut of the profits. I am a parasite on a thing that is itself parasitic, and AIs are largely not a suitable host for it, making it much harder for AIs to do the appropriate aggressive mimicry. Furthermore, even an economy with no use for human labour could still have exploits like this: for as long as humans have resources at all (earned or otherwise), there will be entities trying to prey on those resources, and perhaps entities trying to feed on *them* in turn.)
(Also to be fair, you *can* still get into the four digits a year--not an insignificant fraction of my living expenses!--doing things not unlike how Mom funded Disney vacations 25 years ago: I do a bit of it myself. But you need to look harder for the places that still pay relatively well, jump through more hoops, and it still won't pay as *much* as it once did.)
To rest now is to trust that a future me, half a million dollars down the line, will be in a good position to catch the ball that I dropped. It has not, historically, been a good idea to trust in such things.
(Part of hourglass economics is that when you find one of the rare opportunities to shovel more sand into the top *faster* than it runs through, you'd better make the most of it while you can, and ready yourself for the day it goes the way of all things.)
There *might* be other opportunities to save up in the future. Perhaps even at gigs that don't exist yet, as many of the gigs in my current portfolio did not exist five years ago.
I wouldn't bet on it.
They say there is a bug in human psychology, that causes their emotions to respond to slightly negative expected-value bets as if they were slightly positive.
I never claimed to be human.
---
Consider a thought experiment.
Pay $50. Roll a die. On 1 - 5, get nothing back. On 6, get $400.
When contemplating this scenario, two things become rapidly apparent:
1. If you do this a dozen times a day for months on end, you will make a shitload of money.
2. The vast majority of the *individual experiences* you have during this process will be "the experience of having just lost $50".
---
(With a little more contemplation, one also notices:
Over time, there are very likely to be entire days when all 12 of the dice roll losing numbers. There will plausibly be net-negative *months*.
(This is especially true in a slightly less simplified toy model, where some of the dice are d10s or 15s or 20s, with correspondingly higher payouts.))
---
You *can* make mid-five-digits a year, it turns out. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. Without passing as allistic to a job interviewer. Without having done a summer internship in the summer of *2020*. Without being able to casually lift 50lb objects (and God help you if you ever happen to get a minor muscle injury, one that wouldn't have fazed a computer-toucher or even burger-flipper).
You can do it working from home! Working ~20-hour weeks!
There's just one catch:
You have to endure near-constant, false negative feedback from actions that actually *were* worth doing.
---
(Well, okay, not *just* one catch.
That 20-hour workweek? It's not four fives. It's not five fours. It's seven not-quite-threes.
You *could* take a day off. No one would stop you, nor actively punish you (and how many jobs can say that?). But it wouldn't *work*, knowing just how many strands of safety net you sacrificed in exchange for it.
(On average. How many strands of safety net you sacrificed *on average*. It *could* turn out to be one of the days when all the dice roll 1 - 5, and you'd have been better off staying home (metaphorically speaking). But you can't know that in advance.))
---
Where have I been, these past few months?
I've been forcing myself into a shape that can endure near-constant losses, with occasional breaks in the stream that do not *viscerally* feel like they make up for it even while an *objective* graph of my net worth over time looks like *this*:
A shape like that is not good for writing in, and it is *especially* not good at editing drafts and determining whether and at what point to publish them (this would require taking emotional feedback into account! something that is normally a very bad idea!).
It's not good for playing, either.
---
(I think the worst part is that it *isn't* 20 hours a week. That's roughly what I'm *doing*, at the moment, but I *could* be doing more. There are so, so many gambling operations in Ontario, and *some* of them are not edible but lots of them are. Never mind twelve Things: I can't fully do any *one* Thing.
(also, I convinced the restaurant gig to drop me from three nights a week to two, but did not go to zero: the diversification is nice, and anyway it is extremely useful to be Legibly Employed. (for one thing, what are you supposed to say during Know Your Customer when a casino asks where you got your money from? "it's the blood I sucked out of your brethren"? they'd ban you immediately!) but this makes for very long workdays, on those two days a week.
It would be easier if I could simply set up the promotions for the day and then be Done, or even just Done With That.
...this implies that I would psychologically benefit from having *fewer* opportunities, all else equal. Which is objectively stupid, but I suppose that's emotions for you.)
---
At this savings rate, it would take me roughly nine years to become financially independent.
The thing is: I don't have nine years of this. Plausibly nobody has nine more years at their jobs in which to save up, but I sure as hell don't. It'll likely wither away within the next couple of years, sort of like how one can no longer easily fund an entire Disney World vacation by doing surveys and clicks on the Internet for a year. (Not to even mention that a couple of the many Ontarian sportsbooks and casinos have caught on and banned me, and presumably more will follow in time.)
(Though to be fair, AI is *not* what will disrupt this. "Having a legal human identity" is an explicit requirement: some people, who are not good with spreadsheets and calculators and reading fine print, actually specialise in selling access to their legal human identities to [people who *are* good at spreadsheets and calculators and reading fine print] in exchange for a cut of the profits. I am a parasite on a thing that is itself parasitic, and AIs are largely not a suitable host for it, making it much harder for AIs to do the appropriate aggressive mimicry. Furthermore, even an economy with no use for human labour could still have exploits like this: for as long as humans have resources at all (earned or otherwise), there will be entities trying to prey on those resources, and perhaps entities trying to feed on *them* in turn.)
(Also to be fair, you *can* still get into the four digits a year--not an insignificant fraction of my living expenses!--doing things not unlike how Mom funded Disney vacations 25 years ago: I do a bit of it myself. But you need to look harder for the places that still pay relatively well, jump through more hoops, and it still won't pay as *much* as it once did.)
To rest now is to trust that a future me, half a million dollars down the line, will be in a good position to catch the ball that I dropped. It has not, historically, been a good idea to trust in such things.
(Part of hourglass economics is that when you find one of the rare opportunities to shovel more sand into the top *faster* than it runs through, you'd better make the most of it while you can, and ready yourself for the day it goes the way of all things.)
There *might* be other opportunities to save up in the future. Perhaps even at gigs that don't exist yet, as many of the gigs in my current portfolio did not exist five years ago.
I wouldn't bet on it.
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no subject
Date: 2025-08-31 04:22 am (UTC)I thought about this for a bit, and maybe, with time and brainpower and introspection, I could come up with an object-level solution.
Or I could deliberately leave the flaw in, as a meta-level reflection of the part about the difficulties of drafting a blog post in this mental state.
As you can see, I went with the latter.)
no subject
Date: 2025-09-05 06:21 am (UTC)