Last night, I stumbled across some new social media site in which a lot of people were talking about their layoffs or fear of future layoffs from big tech companies, and some were pretty detailed and terrified. It got me thinking (“always a dangerous thing!”).
First of all, I’m not unsympathetic. I have friends who have gone through this, and several recruiter connections that I used to work with. It’s ugly, and unpleasant.
Moreover, I sometimes wonder if I took the wrong year off. My last day at work was literally the stock market high in 2022, and it dropped the very next week, from which it has yet to recover. What’s even more, I have now been unemployed for a year, and I might be competing with many of these laid-off workers!
From the human perspective, this would seem to be the case, but from the spiritual perspective, I don’t believe it is. Several major events led up to me taking a year off, and all of it seemed to be guided. I remember praying that I’d have the time to build up the appropriately sized cash cushion, and not only did that happen, but I also got a hefty $2,500 certification bonus during the time leading up to my decision to pull the plug. Many things fell into place at the right time, and I don’t believe God brought me through all of this just to lead me into perpetual unemployment due to the new glut of tech workers competing in the space. Also, trekking the Annapurna Circuit was a dream come true, and although the second trip to Nepal didn’t go as planned, it was still pretty cool, and I keep wondering what I can do to get back there for another go.
But this does highlight something oddly specific since writing the other day: Jacob Fisker was totally right.
A lot of these people were earning really high salaries, and some were complaining about how they had a house and kids to care for. Like, what the hell did you do with that $200k/year you were earning? Does everybody assume the gravy train will never stop?
It really dawned on me what Jacob meant by saying that people are consumers and not producers. The whole imperative that most parents place on their kids of “getting a good job” is all about being able to afford things. It’s about being able to pay someone to cook food for you, to fix your car, to buy a new car since you can’t fix it yourself, to buy more and more furniture to fill your already-full house. It’s about paying to go to the movies and eat junk food there, sending your kids to ridiculously overpriced schools (so they can supposedly go on to earns lots of money, too), pay someone to maintain that massive house, rinse and repeat. And the linchpin of it all is just hoping you earn enough money consistently over time to afford all of these luxuries. Learn to do these things yourself? Ha! “Honey, that’s for peasants!”
(My inner INTJ asshole is coming out. I apologize)
In such a way, children have become commoditized for advertisers, since parents often think that being a good parent is about being able to “afford” things for their children, whether that’s childcare, summer camp, toys, educational opportunities, sports, science club, private school, you name it – having children is all about spending money. Often, it’s even a matter of buying giant ass, gas-guzzling SUVs “for the safety”. No wonder so many people are piss poor! We have all the education in the world, and none of it works in our favor because we don’t let it. We aren’t producers: we’re consumers.
To be clear, I think God has something lined up for me as far as work is concerned. But it also occurred to me that I have one distinct advantage over many of these workers: I can compete on price. Because I was never earning some crazy $150k, I’m quite capable of living on less, even $50-60k if necessary (and that’s being picky and insisting on still having some money to save). Mind you, my rent will be higher when I move out of state, but I don’t think it will be a problem, since my needs are so few, and I don’t think I’ll have to accept such a “low” income anyway. But because I live well below my means, I can always compete on price. If you earn a boatload of money but have filled up your life with consumer purchases, whatever those look like, it’s much harder to be flexible.
It’s also been eye-opening, trying to make this career shift, just how many jobs I don’t qualify for. At the same time…the vast majority of jobs that sound interesting only require 2-5 years of experience. And it has me thinking…what if I spent 2 years as a systems administrator? What if I spent 2 years as a network administrator? What if I spent 2 years in security, or in embedded systems? What if – holy shit – I actually qualified for quite a number of these jobs? Well, I’d probably always be able to earn around $90k, and could skip jobs at will (thought I might want to swap around more often. 2 years as a network admin might not be too useful if it was 20 years ago, for example). So the next question becomes, how do I continue building a resilient lifestyle?
I think it’s helpful to think about the big 3: housing, transportation, and food. Housing is the most expensive and the most volatile. Rents can go up, houses break down, markets shift. This goes back to the ecology of housing I’ve written about before. The simpler and smaller your house, generally, the less expensive it is to maintain. Ditto an apartment, although the biggest advantage there is choosing a small footprint and saving on heating/AC (total utilities for this house were around $500 in December!). I considered getting an apartment with two rooms in it, one for my bedroom and the other for an office/guest room, but I’d probably never have any guests over unless my dad came down to go fishing or something, and I honestly don’t need much space for an office. Eventually, I realized that a one bedroom apartment, where the bedroom is maybe larger than normal (kind of like at my old apartment) in which I could fit my desk comfortably, would be good enough. Unless I find some sort of mother-in-law suite that rents for cheaper.
As much as I bash on houses, I do like the idea of having a small one paid off. A paid off house adds considerable flexibility to your life, but a mortgage adds considerable inflexibility to your life. It’s kinda funny how that works. But because of this, I’ve decided to keep renting and socking money away in investments. If I never buy a house, the investments might actually pay my rent, but if I do buy a house, ideally I can pay cash. Having a family complicates things, but I don’t want a large family, so I don’t think too much about that. As a single guy with no dependents, it just makes sense to stat-max at this point in life. Sure, there may be a day when my savings rate drops, but until then, the plan is to build as much inherent flexibility into my life as possible. Besides, your kids don’t generally live with you forever.
As for transportation, well, I still want to learn how to successfully pull an engine and do maintenance on it. Pulling the engine can save many headaches, but only if you can do it right and avoid the headaches it can otherwise cause. I still think I’m at something of a wall, though, where I can do moderately technical tasks like swapping power steering racks, but more advanced tasks require additional large equipment and the appropriate storage space for them. Probably I could finally try to learn about electricity and electrical troubleshooting, which would double as being beneficial for learning embedded systems programming at the same time that it would help me more accurately diagnose car issues. I mean, you can unload the parts cannon if you have the money, but ideally you could just properly diagnose the true issue the first time. That’s still super useful, even if you never develop the skills to swap an engine.
For food, it means I should really stop buying these trash energy drinks. It makes me feel like an absolute idiot when I sometimes pay $4 for one of these. A 5-pound bag of potatoes is like $2.50. How many meals could that make instead? Now, you have to be careful with food because I don’t think it should be anybody’s goal to live on rice and potatoes alone, but I guarantee you those potatoes are healthier for you than trash energy drinks. Damn, I could stretch my budget so much further if I stopped buying things like this.
Recently I discovered making homemade hamburgers. As in, buying a pound of ground beef, rolling four patties, and smashing them out. Now, I did buy a $20 burger smasher for this purpose, which is a little silly since so many other things can do the job, but it is durable and it’s made of metal so there’s very little risk of burning it, but it’s allowed me to make my own sort of “smash burgers”. I’ll smash two out, which cook stupidly quick this way, get some salt on the inside, put some cheese on, and have a double cheeseburger from it all. With meat, bun, and cheese, I think one double burger probably costs around $3.50, compared to something similar from Five Guys, which usually costs around $15. Some people think cheeseburgers are terrible for you, but I think this is just old thinking based on the presumption that eating fat makes you fat. [I have heard, though, that deep frying potatoes kills some of their nutrients? I like fries, but I like burgers more] I find cheeseburgers to be quite energizing, but I find that drinking some sodas makes me feel absolutely sick. I’m no health expert, but you can guess what I don’t mind consuming and what I’m trying to avoid. You probably don’t want to overdo it, but I’m tired of food trends preventing me from cooking fresh foods for myself out of manufactured fear. Technically, I can make the buns myself, too, which I haven’t done in awhile.
See things like this, if only I stuck to them on a greater scale, can save so much money. I get in the really bad habit of going to the grocery store just to get out of the house, though, and I also have a hard time planning meals, preferring just to roll with whatever I want that day. A cheaper, maybe even healthier option would be to go to the gym if I need a change of scenery, or better yet, take more walks (although sometimes you are at the mercy of the weather this way). But there are many options.
Also, I hate old recipes because they were designed for large farm families. You’ll find a recipe and it will cook for like 12 people. Fuck off. Very slowly I’ve been finding ways to make one-off meals I can prep easily, such as the aforementioned cheeseburger, or a dish I modified from the internet that is basically chicken, rice, zucchini, mushrooms, garlic, and coconut aminos. It’s delicious, though admittedly I’m rarely in the mood for it. I believe it’s pretty cheap, too. Hardest part is just setting the chicken out to thaw (I’ve found that buying bags of very lightly preserved frozen chicken are far more economical than buying fresh chicken because I’m less likely to let them go to waste).
All this to say, there are many ways to save money on food. It takes dedication, but if it really is the 3rd most expensive thing you will spend money on in your life, it behooves you to learn ways to do it, rather than just constantly outsourcing your food for such a steep price.
Trying to bring this back around to the tech industry, it’s just interesting that there is so much focus on earning as much money as possible. For all of the crazy amount of skill that gets poured into these big companies, it’s sad to me that your efforts could just ultimately be to help trolls argue with each other on Twitter. Like…do people actually want to work at those shitholes? Facebook? Even Amazon? Really? I guess Google does some cool projects, but they are still built on violating your privacy. I don’t understand the appeal. But hey, if they all want to compete for those positions, let them! Stay the heck away from my domain 🙂 . I might not earn as much, but if I play my cards correctly, I won’t need to, either.