Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.
This is the part I agree with most. In your 30s, you start to see a bifurcation whereby the people who take the corporate grind seriously go into cognitive atrophy, while those who have a fuck-it attitude keep getting smarter but become less employable (due to age and their shitty job histories). You do turn into a moron if you buy into whatever role the corporates are willing to give you. The more you believe in it, the faster you lose intelligence. It's probably optimal to be able to pretend you buy into corporate, while not actually investing yourself in it at all, but most nerds aren't very good at this code-switching.
It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.
I thought it was lobsters the libertarians were all on about.
Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corporate is corporate. It's all trash. It shouldn't exist. Capitalism is a dinosaur. That said, it's usually better to work for a large company than a small one. In a big company, you can move around. There's more diversity of work, and there's more organizational experience with outlier talent. (That doesn't mean you'll be recognized as outlier talent. If you work at Google and have a 160 IQ but mediocre paperwork, you'll probably just get a regular assignment.) At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow except by becoming a manager. Which means it's not really any different from the old corporate grind-- it just has worse benefits and more ways to fall between the cracks (and that's by design).
> At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow
This is kind of the opposite of what I've seen reported around here.
Small startups, they say, are exactly where you should work for a while in order to grow and develop a lot of new skills, which are then valuable elsewhere.
Meanwhile a number of people at large companies report being bored at work.
A lot of people at large companies are bored at work because a lot of work is boring, and because corporate life sucks. If you control for age-- notice that startups tend to prey on the young-- then I don't think small company work, at the bottom, is any less boring.
This is the part I agree with most. In your 30s, you start to see a bifurcation whereby the people who take the corporate grind seriously go into cognitive atrophy, while those who have a fuck-it attitude keep getting smarter but become less employable (due to age and their shitty job histories). You do turn into a moron if you buy into whatever role the corporates are willing to give you. The more you believe in it, the faster you lose intelligence. It's probably optimal to be able to pretend you buy into corporate, while not actually investing yourself in it at all, but most nerds aren't very good at this code-switching.
It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.
I thought it was lobsters the libertarians were all on about.
Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corporate is corporate. It's all trash. It shouldn't exist. Capitalism is a dinosaur. That said, it's usually better to work for a large company than a small one. In a big company, you can move around. There's more diversity of work, and there's more organizational experience with outlier talent. (That doesn't mean you'll be recognized as outlier talent. If you work at Google and have a 160 IQ but mediocre paperwork, you'll probably just get a regular assignment.) At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow except by becoming a manager. Which means it's not really any different from the old corporate grind-- it just has worse benefits and more ways to fall between the cracks (and that's by design).