I've done many hallucinogens and have seen great things but "unspeakable horrors" too. It was a legitimately terrifying experience but I came out of it feeling mentally strong and stable.

I can't recommend anyone to try it since not everyone may be able to handle it. But it was an amazing experience I don't regret at all.

Surgery is just a bandaid on a systemic problem. We still don't even know why we are obese! Certain groups say carbs are the devil (what about Japan, China who eat a lot of rice and keep their obesity rates very low?). Other groups say it's saturated fats (what about the thousands of years history we have of eating fats? Obesity is a very recent problem).

You will probably get fatter living in a suburb driving everywhere rather than say NYC. But that's not enough to explain the difference between countries.

What about pollutants? The food, the water, the air, the feed for animals, the antibiotics, pesticides, seed oils, microplastics?

Ok but if you have a mansion and no friends or family what's the point? You want the experience of spending time with people you like.

The same points of having friends and family but living in a poverty-ridden slum, where you can have the experience of watching your loved ones die of cholera.

I am not in favor of pursuing wealth at all costs, but there's a balance in having enough material wealth to live in a decent place in a safe, aesthetically pleasing neighborhood, having freedom of movement, being able to access healthcare and education, not starving, being physically fit, etc.

Things beyond that are superfluous and won't make you happier by themselves.

Why are you making this an unnecessary binary decision?

This is a false dichotomy. There is jo binary choice. This brings forth useless statements like money can't buy happiness.

Even just 5 years ago you could get great roles without a degree. That era is over

Ehhh 5 years ago it was still very difficult. I knew a large cohort that attempted this but failed and went to a Bootcamp (and got hired that way) instead.

Yeah, he's going to have a lot of regrets later on socially. But these type of kids would fit in a traditional school anyway so maybe its for the best.

Just one data point at one company, I passed the final stage with good feedback but after a long delay was told the offer was given to an internal candidate instead as headcount is really low for new hires. So a waste of time

This is also why I’ve been recommending people to focus on small company roles. The big techs have too many internal folks who may have their job cut, and they also have recruiting orgs (mostly still) that are willing to burn your time without making sure the job will still be there after you spend all your time interviewing for them.

every meme started as a 4chan meme

this is a great disrespect to the memes that were born on SA

I burned out last year, luckily I had the funds to quit without anything lined up and been semi-retired ever since. I'd like to work again but modern software jobs ask for too much. Why should I dedicate so much of my life and brainpower to 24/7 oncall and managing development? No amount of money is worth the stress.

Same. I decided to go solo.

It's more stressful, more difficult, but working for yourself, on things you care about, is the difference between being engaged and burning out. It satisfies me deep in my soul. These days I work harder than I have ever have in my life, and I feel more free than I have ever felt before.

We are not made to slave for someone else. Let alone 8 hours a day, sitting in a cubicle, preparing TPS reports, for 50 years. I still have post-traumatic guilt when I take an afternoon off or I take a longer lunch break.

Go build something you care about, with your hands and sweat.

How did you do it? How did you find customer to pay you enough to make a living?

As someone who is considering doing the same, would you mind sharing how many times your yearly expenses you consider enough to quit without anything lined up?

I live in London. I burned through my entire savings of £60,000 in a year and a half of burnout recovery and therapy; 1.5x my yearly expenditure.

I am broke now, and recovered. It is the best money I have spent.

I do not want to imagine where would I be without that money stashed away.

Not OP, but I quit 10 years ago without a clear plan with around 1.5 years of runway. Did a bit of freelancing after that and now run my own company. I'm usually more on the risk-averse side of things, but that felt safe enough for me.

How did you find these freelance gigs and what were your tasks?

Exclusively from previous work relationships. Mostly around network infrastructure stuff (BGP automation) and e-commerce full-stack development and operation. I explicitly only took gigs that where very clear in scope to ensure I had enough time to try out my own ideas.

Thanks

I get why you ask but it really doesn't matter, when you burn out you have no choice but to quit. The money determines how long you can relax before getting your next job.

Although homeschooling may help with academics, what about socializing? Traditional schools are by far the better option for making friends as a kid

I remember school as a massive waste of time, but it definitely helped me develop social skills.

That said, I'm really not seeing this effect with my kids in the SF Bay Area. They have few opportunities to socialize on school grounds, and are then whisked away by parents and taken to after-school classes or back home to sit in front of a computer. "Socialization" boils down to kids hanging around on social networks on their phones. And even these seem to be shifting from chat to passive consumption (TikTok, etc).

“Socializing” children in schools is an oxymoron. School is where children are prevented from becoming socialized by being placed into an age-segregated situation with only one authority figure present. It’s only a slight improvement on Lord of the Flies.

This doesn't make a lot of sense: classrooms are full of other children, who socialize with each other. Classrooms empty into lunchrooms and schoolyards, which are not segregated by year.

> classrooms are full of other children

of the same age.

> Classrooms empty into lunchrooms and schoolyards, which are not segregated by year.

In my experience, in elementary school our class had assigned tables for lunch and a specific time when we had the playground and blacktop. YMMV. But at any rate a half hour in the cafeteria and a half hour in the yard aren't the best places a child could learn to interact with other children; the characteristics of these activities are constrained by the form of the institution.

My schools (all of them) had open seating and free-for-alls in their open areas; at my high school, they didn’t even bother trying to keep us inside the grounds (which meant that we could, and did, go socialize with the neighborhood.) This is in a school system that contains roughly a million students, and (AFAIK) didn’t impose significant differences between individual schools.

I can’t imagine assigned seating working very well, except for at a very small school in a small district. Yours might not be a representative case.

Any decent-sized town or city will have homeschooling groups that organize regular activities to address that issue. Often parents will also form small homeschooling groups or pods that provide socialization opportunities during "class". Plus there are classic extracurriculars like sports teams, music, etc. Social media has also helped a lot with organizing and coordinating these sorts of groups.

How about if the trip never occured at all and they had a zoom meeting? Does this even need to be a zoom meeting, why not a slack convo?

Have you considered a well-written email, followed by an offer of chat if anything remains unclear?

email written by chatgpt, on the other side interpreted by chatgpt again .. until someone invents machine readable chatgpt written email ..

They are literally zooming