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…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/

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/

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/

• 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/

• 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/

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/

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 answer is the correct one.

/end

ADDENDUM: @aubilenon summed up my whole thread much better than I could have.
https://escaperooms.social/@aubilenon/111767010966385336

@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

[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]

If you can’t have a conversation like that with your employer, maybe consider unionizing.

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.

@inthehands This definitely set me up for success. I was able to get a good nest egg in the bank by buying a good used car at 20 and driving it until I was in my mid 30s.

Living in a one bedroom apartment until we had our first kid (at around the same time) also helped.

@tshirtman @inthehands Not nearly blind, but defiinitely finding it harder to drive at night and needing to scale up my screen text hella huge.

@pluralistic @tshirtman
I’ll second: do take care of yourself. A body is a lot.