Paul Cantrell
A personal story in support of what @Daojoan is saying here:
At 23, less than 2 years into my first job out of college, I quit to spend several months traveling North & Central America and sleeping on friends’ couches. I’m so glad I did.
At 27, having saved money by living in a tiny apartment, I took an entire year off to devote to music and…whatever. And I’m so glad I did, because “whatever” turned out to be…
Paul Cantrell
…taking Argentine tango lessons, because I like Astor Piazzolla and why not, and a random person showed up to check out the lessons one night, and now we’re married, have a kid, and have been together coming up on 20 years.
And I took another break at 31 to go teach a course for fun, which turned into a second career.
And I took another break from work to record The Broken Mirror of Memory and tour it with Pat O’Keefe.
And another to spend •real• time with my new infant.
And and and…
2/
Paul Cantrell
If I’d taken hustle-bro-dude’s advice and done nothing but “work my butt off at the beginning,” everything I love most in my life — my kid, my spouse, my music, my teaching, my creative software work, all of it — would be…well, it wouldn’t be.
Thank you so much, younger me, for giving me the life I have now.
Thank you, younger me, for living as if life’s not all work.
3/
Paul Cantrell
My anti-hustle-bro advice for folks at the starts of their careers, in case anyone wants it:
• Your job is to live. Make your life your priority.
• Unfortunately, yes, living involves money — and much of early adulthood is about cultivating a healthy relationship with money. Greed is not healthy. Spite is not healthy. What is healthy? Having an “enough.” Knowing what “enough” is for you, and being practical about it.
4/
Paul Cantrell
• Set healthy boundaries around what you give of your time, energy, health (physical and psychological). Sometimes it can be fun to go hard, to dig in and do the crunch — for a job, for a personal endeavor, whatever! Just be mindful. Know where your boundaries are. Figure it out. They’re a whole hell of a lot easier to set when you’re young.
5/
Paul Cantrell
• The best financial advice I ever got: As people earn more, they tend to take on more non-discretionary expenses. Those box you in, because they’re hard to shed. If you’re short on money, you can just stop eating out so much, but you can’t just stop paying an expensive mortgage. Live like a college student for as long as you can! If you have the good fortune of extra money, use it to pay off debts.
6/
Paul Cantrell
This hustle culture nonsense really pisses me off.
Being desperate for work, desperate for money, absolutely sucks. Why cultivate that as a virtue?!
One of the great cruelties of poverty — beyond the misery of material desperation — is the way it prevents people from being able to become themselves, to explore, to go take tango lessons and record an album and hwatever, to breathe. It’s inhumane. We should be •extinguishing• that inhumanity, not encouraging it to creep up the income ladder.
7/
Paul Cantrell
As @pluralistic put it, “In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves.” [https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/]
And hustle culture is a scam. The people selling it on social media aren’t the better for it. So who is profiting from it? Who profits from people volunteering for self-destructive, no-boundaries overwork that pads every job with free labor, paid at personal expense?
The obvious answe is the correct one.
/end
Jesse Morris
@inthehands Another take: The ability to navigate multiple conflicting priorities is one of the most useful skills a person can develop (valuable both personally and professionally), and saying "don't even start thinking about that until mid-career" is bad advice.
Paul Cantrell
ADDENDUM: @aubilenon summed up my whole thread much better than I could have.
https://escaperooms.social/@aubilenon/111767010966385336
Paul Cantrell
@paulcox It’s absolutely a privilege (see subsequent post in thread), and it’s one that we encourage people to waste.
Paul
@inthehands yeah, I've always found that quite a number of people ignore this side of the "wealth" equation. (Not ignoring that for many people there's a certain amount of privilege in being able to do this)
Paul Cantrell
@aubilenon This from @datarama raises an important point:
https://hachyderm.io/@datarama/111767058042074636
There’s a different kind of hustle culture that lives in caregiving professions: teaching, medical work, social services, etc. In those jobs, the need is •infinite•, resources are finite (often grossly inadequate), and every extra minute you sacrifice has a real, positive impact.
The hustle of endless self-giving.
A1/
Paul Cantrell
@datarama My advice about figuring out one’s own boundaries and setting them from the start applies to these jobs, too.
As a teacher, I want to say to anyone struggling with the pressure to give every drop of blood you have for your students / patients / people you’re caring for:
It is not your job to personally prop up failing systems. You are not obliged to do that. It’s not all on you.
Do what you can while staying healthy. Don’t let the system off the hook by doing more than that.
A2/2
Paul Cantrell
[Because specifics help, an actual conversation I had with an employer at age 25 or 26]
BOSS: We’re asking people to come in this weekend.
PAUL: I could come in Sat, so when should I take the day off to make up for it?
BOSS: We don’t do comp time.
PAUL: And I don’t work weekends, but I’m sure we can work out an arrangement.
[Spoiler: we worked out an arrangement]
Paul Cantrell
If you can’t have a conversation like that with your employer, maybe consider unionizing.
Paul Cantrell
@pluralistic @tshirtman
I’ll second: do take care of yourself. A body is a lot.
Cory Doctorow
@tshirtman @inthehands Not nearly blind, but defiinitely finding it harder to drive at night and needing to scale up my screen text hella huge.
Gabriel Pettier
@inthehands @pluralistic well, this reminds me how Cory said that he couldn't take a few months off work to fix his eyes, despite being nearly blind from cataracts at this point, sad irony of the point you are making.
You are doing good work Cory, but i hope you take care of yourself! (if you did and i missed it, good!)
Paul Cantrell
@larsmb
It was a colleague at an internship who gave it to me at age 20 or so, and it was worth the whole internship right there
Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷
@inthehands Someone should have given that lesson to me, 25 years ago :-D
Paul Cantrell
@Sbectol
Nice work if you can get it!
Sbectol :twt:
@inthehands I’ve been doing anti-hustle for 20+ years. Fortunately my wife earns enough to pay the bills and I’ve been keeping house, raising the child and growing veg
Paul Cantrell
@Karstan
Generally agreed, but with the proviso that the debt versus savings ratio should mostly be about the interest on those two things. If for example you have credit card debt at 15% interest paying down is a •guaranteed• 15% return — and there’s simply no savings or investment that can match that.
Bruh-soka Tano
@inthehands A good rule of thumb that has helped me with lifestyle bloat: All windfalls and raises in salary are divided as follows: 1/3 to savings, 1/3 to debt, 1/3 to spend as I please.
Paul Cantrell
@ShadSterling Ha, well, maybe not in the “bad diet” sense, nor the excessive drinking that so many think is the point of college
ShadSterling
@inthehands having gone back to college at 30ish and had the “poor student diet” literally almost kill me, I don’t think living like a college student for as long as you can is a good idea
Paul Cantrell
ADDENDUM because “live like a college student for as long as you can” was remarkably unclear phrasing:
https://mastodon.social/@ShadSterling/111767948945069246
I was thinking of living simply and not jumping deep into debt for a too-big house and car and consumerist waste. I was not thinking of eating garbage, binge drinking, etc, which I realize is what “college” means to many.
Please be kind to your future self by taking care of your present self — in college, after college, before college, at any age.
ShadSterling
@inthehands I mean, if I could spend most of my time learning things again I might, but there’s nothing else about living like a college student that I’d go back to. Definitely not taking on that kind of debt again. Or the maniacal deadline schedule.
Tho for me, the closest I could get to taking a break from having an income was to go back to school and take on potentially crippling debt. I didn’t even learn the skills I now use to pay off that debt
Paul Cantrell
@ShadSterling Nobody should have crushing debt from education, period. That’s not right.
When I was a college student, my expenses were lower. I had a lot less junk. I lived in a smaller space. I didn’t have a car. My life was simpler in many ways. Those are the specific parts of my experience I’d recommend hanging on to for a while in young adulthood for those who have them — in large part because of paying off debt.
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