I've been investing in low cost index funds for decades. Although not "income" in the spirit of your question, these funds distribute quarterly dividends which is income. This is truly passive income.
This is the way. A common theme for older people is wishing they worked less and spent more time with family. I have two kids and cant imagine sacrificing more time than absolutely necessary working. Once my first was born, my priorities immediately changed. Its difficult to describe but work instantly became a lower priority.
I don't think its possible to define what a perfect codebase would look like let alone write one. Programming is enough of an art form that quantitative analysis will always fall short. This also happens to be one of the reasons I love to write software.
If European society survived the Black Plague we will be fine. Imagine living in a time where an unknown virus kills half of the population. Half of everyone you know is gone. This is only one of countless examples throughout history.
No doubt today we have unique challenges but I am optimistic we will overcome and thrive. Like a poster mentioned above, perhaps its time to log off and go for a walk.
I'm sorry, European society didn't survive the black plague if the term "survive" means anything but avoiding utter obliteration.
Entire cities were ravaged and collapsed - half of the entire population died not only from the disease but the ensuring famine resulting from supply chain collapse. Cultures were erased in their entirety, wars were started that lasted an entire lifetime, it defined the socioeconomic landscape of the world that came after. It's one of the reasons the Mongol Empire collapsed, religion took a stronger hold, and peasantry rose!
Now we live in a much different world. Tens of millions in a single city, utterly reliant on importants. Farming that requires fertilizer imports and machines.
It wouldn't be extinction, but a similar event would be utterly horrific and absolutely qualify as a collapse of society.
Do I think society will collapse on 10 years because of politics / economy? No, absolutely not. But to point to the black death and say it didn't collapse society is utterly ridiculous.
This reinforces my belief that today is the best time in human history to live. Yes there is still pain and suffering but overall more humans live lives our ancestors could not begin to imagine.
>Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.
I'm pretty sure that abysmal health options, food insecurity to the point of famine always being just a stone's throw or single bad season away, and grinding poverty all created plenty of stress. The vast majority of people at the time just had no IG Reels with which to vent about their crisis mode for posterity. I just can't imagine any random modern person's level of stress being somehow worse.
As for lack of direction. Life in those times for a vast majority had a simple direction: labor and toil intensely until you die of old age/disease in the same place you were born, rarely straying more than a few miles from those horizons. I'd call today's self-created "lack of direction" pretty preferable to that.
I've read stress is probably much worse today because of the speed at which we experience stressful events. Sure famine and illness were a concern, and we still have to stress and concern ourselves about resource accumulation and illness today. But we also have a great deal of additional stress that didn't really exist at that time and much of it is stress that we have to simply put away to deal with other things so that we don't fall victim to MORE stressful situations. Just the fact that everytime you pass a car in opposing traffic you are about 5 feet away from having a total stranger kill you is a wildly stressful event that we mostly just abstract away and internalize in order to get where we are going at around 100ft per second. We also have the mental overhead of knowing that any sort of stressful event that happens we will become immediately aware of it.
It used to be a thing that people would have nervous breakdowns (panic attack) before checking the mail if they were worried about some impending news. Such as a son at war or a sick relative etc. Now we are simply in that state at pretty much any given time.
And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.
This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.
Maybe arguing over different interpretations of it, but I think it's obviously true. Once you become separated by too many generations from the first-person experience of a world war, a famine, now-preventable childhood illnesses and deaths, fascism, etc. it becomes impossible to truly grok the fully weight and critical importance of why we take these menaces so seriously. And some of these things have happened more recently to some, and you don't see people from those regions being as confused as Americans, for example, for why you don't embrace fascism, or Russia, or anti vaccinations, etc.
When a population spends a generations enjoying a world without all these diseases, they lose the social herd immunity to the intellectual stupidity that's proliferating today, now helped along by increasingly prominent figures, including one government health department head [1][2][3].
And yet the second World War, the most destructive war in history, and fascism and nazism themselves, occurred within a generation of the end of the first World War, the most destructive war in their history.
Throughout history, war has always begotten more war. Look at the Middle East today: by your logic, it should be the most peaceful place on Earth by now, given how all of the people born there for the last 50 years had been through war (and often famine etc). And yet many of them are actively seeking more war to right the wrongs of the war before, or just because they see their neighbors are weak and it's a good chance to invade them and "rebuild our historic lands".
Yea I know a couple of people who watched their families and friends get chopped to bits with machetes and lemme tell you, they are not stronger for it. I would maybe rethink this idea. I suspect ignorance has always thrived.
Same goes for preventative maintenance, handling technical debt or any action that keeps negative consequences at bay. It's a failure mode that's almost an inverse of loss-aversion; some people will start asking "Why are we investing in $ACTION, it seems unnecessary as nothing bad ever happens"
I'm not sure. I was thinking about going back to school and re-training entirely. Maybe electrical engineering or something. Some days I just want to be a plumber or electrician.
I've been working in web and I really do like building front ends, but I'm very tired of being "full stack", especially when the stack is a cobbled together mishmash of microservices and cloud architecture that just keeps growing in complexity
I just want to be able to focus on one thing and get good at it. Being "full stack" feels like it's preventing me from really focusing in and becoming an expert on any one thing
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