There's a Place for Everyone

I only skimmed but I don’t find this philosophy particularly interesting.

The implication here is that everyone has one best place, but in reality there are many local maximums. The opportunity cost of traversing a valley for a slightly higher maximum may not be worth it.

The post also conflates employment with happiness. Not having a paying job is a valid life choice. Stay at home parent is a completely valid niche.

Picking a job or career based on the free time it allows to pursue hobbies is also valid.

None of this is easy and the post doesn’t seem to provide any insight into finding a good fit.

The idea that we have one “best” fit is the self-help equivalent of “perfect is the enemy of good”.

It's a fun, upbeat article, but as an actual case, I think it falls down here:

> Our abundance of weirdos creates diversity not only in supply, but also in demand.

That's certainly true (imo), but the author seems to implicitly expect the supply and demand to match up and I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that they do not.

Thinking narrowly about jobs, there are a lot more people that want to be artists than people that want to buy art, causing art to be a pretty hard industry to make a living in. This is equally true of any other niche where there are X people wanting it and Y people providing it: there's no reason to expect those to be equal and, as it turns out, they rarely are.

I'm not sure the author captures it perfectly, however...

There is a lake in the U.S. that crosses the borders of Idaho and Utah. On summer weekends, you'll see the Bear Lake Burger Boat trolling the waters. Swim or float up to it, and they'll give you a delicious hamburger.

I'm glad whoever runs it has found a fit in this world. I'm sure it's not what most of us on Hacker News would choose to do, but I am glad someone does.

I thought I'd found my place when I got into open source distributed pub/sub over WebSockets. I worked in this area for over 10 years but you won't find my project in the first 100 results on Google for those niche 7 keywords.

Surprising considering that almost none of these terms even existed 20 years ago.

Well my place in the job world was just outsourced overseas to one of the billions of unique people over there.

Is there a place for people who disagree with the author on marginal tax rates and soybean tariffs?

How many of these niches actually pay enough (or provide enough other benefits) to have a decent quality of life? I think that's the real limiting factor in "finding your niche".

> every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

It be much nicer to start this statement from the reverse. Instead of justifying everyone has a purpose for a society, how about a society justifying itself based on the premise that every person has a purpose (could just be consumerism for all I know but hey).

> We don’t talk much about this, because if the people on Team Overboard were honest about who they plan to purge, none of their intended victims would be friends with them, let alone vote for them.

It's hard to take the piece seriously after that. Obviously a mischaracterization of the group he refers to as "Team Overboard".

A steelman would look something like: "On the other team, they are indifferent as to whether people they don't know find a place for themselves. They are confident that all people they would want to potentially know will find places for themselves."

Because that actually matches some commonly espoused philosophies. On the other hand, I've never heard anyone seriously call for a purge of undesirables, which is what the author claims.

Personally I find this paragraph talking to newly arriving people a gem:

“I’m so glad you’re here! I don’t know if they told you in there, but we’re all trying to do something crazy here, which is to build a place where we believe there’s somewhere for everyone. We have never once in our history even come close to doing this. We’re not close now. But the fact that you’re here means we haven’t failed completely, and maybe with your help we’ll succeed.”

Sort of off topic but this page links to a probably-pseudoscience rabbit hole.

>As far back as the 1950s, it was known that garlic reduced reaction time by two to three times when consumed by pilots taking flight tests.

Does ANYONE know of reference for this? It seemed so bizarre I had to look it up but couldn't see anything obvious.

The author had me with the hook. I wanted to know how this fundamental ethical difference arises and what its psychological and sociological implications are. Maybe I could compare it with other proposed ideological axes.

But I didn't find any of that.

Talking about purpose without mentioning spirituality is to me like talking about politics without mentioning wars : feels like a lot of the reasoning behind is missed, either by prudishness, ignorance or bigotry.

I prefer the completely opposite view: nobody is there with a special purpose, we are all trying to figure what the heck we should do. It seems less welcoming but if you haven't found your place, is it really helpful to be told "keep searching, somewhere the perfect job is waiting for you"?

> every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

> That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.

Some interesting implications of this:

1. Any children you have, would be fulfilling a purpose in the world

2. If you decide not to have that child, you are depriving the world and everyone else of a person who would otherwise fulfill that purpose

3. Recall that no one is superfluous or redundant. So by depriving the world of a person who can fulfill that purpose, you are guaranteeing that the purpose will never be adequately fulfilled

4. The above applies no matter how many children you've already had. Already had 10 children and decided not to have a 11th? Man, you just created a Nicky-sized hole in the ecosystem. Now the whole world will be off-balance because of your tragic decision

5. So yeah, if you don't want the world to be off-balance, you better get out there and have as many kids as humanly possible

No, there’s not.

The evolutionary process is pretty adept at rigorously excluding most personality and physical variants out of all the available options. Pretending otherwise is naive ahistorical nonsense.

> every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

Nice sentiment but wishful thinking lmao. At the very least there are some people for whom nowhere is a perfect fit, and there are people who would fit better in any place they could fit in. I.e. some people are not locally optimal anywhere.

Another issue is we read this and imagine the happy smart consciousness people in our friend groups. What about the psycopaths? Serial killers? Do they deserve a place too? Any environment they would thrive in would be damaging to the general welfare of polite society. Is the point then that anyone can be molded to an ideal?

Thank you for your inspirational words comrade. You are a beacon of hope for all workers of the revolution.

Soviet Labor Committee has a place for you and all others! In fact we need 10,000 laborers to construct a new datacenter. Please report with a set of warm clothes.

/s

tldr honest

im sick of these blue pills