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CronoDAS comments on Ethics and rationality of suicide - Less Wrong
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Hasn't worked out very well for me... maybe I just still haven't managed to achieve adulthood in spite of having lived for 28 years? (I'm still dependent on my parents for food and shelter and feel limited in my ability to refuse demands they make of me.)
I'm the same age as you. Personal autonomy, as in "I can do whatever the fuck I want whenever I want and not justify myself to anybody", is one of my biggest sources of happiness. I distinctly remember the jump in happiness that I felt when I moved away from my parents and started renting an apartment with a girlfriend. Some years later we broke up and I started living alone, and I got a big pleasant shock from that too (outweighing the pain of breakup and then some). What's more, the joy of autonomy doesn't seem to wear off for me, I still feel happy about it every day. YMMV.
If by any chance you'd like to become more self-supporting by finding a programming job, lately I've been getting more and more experience in advising people how to do that, so I can try to help out. (That also applies to everyone else reading this, of course.)
It's also probably useful to note that this kind of freedom seems to bring happiness even if one doesn't actually use it for anything particularly interesting, which is not so obvious when one is in a position of not having it.
Just being able to consider pants entirely optional and ice cream with bacon on it to be dinner and 4am to be an entirely reasonable bedtime (or 6pm a reasonable bedtime and dinner optional and your favorite tea as an anytime drink, or whatever) is enough, in other words. You don't actually have to go skydiving or build the next Google on top of that - unless you want to, of course.
Moving out from my parents' house would require me to get a job. It seems to me as though the result would be trading subservience to my parents for subservience to a boss. For example, I wouldn't be able to have a 4AM bedtime if I had to be at work at 8:00 AM.
For me, putting up with parents was way worse than putting up with a boss. When I lived with my parents, I had no personal space but didn't know it. I thought my room was my "personal space" because that's what they told me. But it was only true for a very stretched definition of the word "personal". When you begin living on your own, you feel the difference.
Also, putting up with a boss is easier in some kinds of jobs, e.g. if you're doing some startuppy thing and everyone shares the same goals. I don't remember ever feeling subservient to a boss in my life, because all my jobs were interesting and that provided enough motivation.
One very significant difference between having to put up with parents and having to put up with a boss is that your boss doesn't live with you - outside of work hours, you don't have to answer to them at all.
If you think you're going to want a 4am bedtime, don't apply for jobs that start at 8am. You do have a choice in that matter. Sometimes it's not an ideal choice - if your preferred job is one that does require you to be there at that hour, you might have to decide whether your preferred bedtime or your preferred job is more important to you. The important bit is that this is your choice to make, though, and that isn't changed by the fact that the choice is less than ideal. You can choose to go with a less awesome job, if you want to go with the more awesome bedtime, and that is the important bit.
I can flip that around; my parents both work, so I don't have to answer to them during standard work hours.
What if you want even more flexibility than that from your "job"? I don't know of too many ways to earn income where you don't have to commit to some specific schedule in advance and can also take unpaid vacations at will, without notice - and those that I do know of (fiction writing, online poker, day trading) aren't ones that I think that I can make a living at. :(
... so long as you stick to things that can be hidden from them, which is a pretty major limitation.
ETA: Also, this situation requires that you keep their preferences in mind, which may be significantly detrimental even if you're generally able to work around them. Not carrying that particular cognitive burden seems likely to be a significant part of it, and with a regular job and boss, you only have to carry that burden during set hours and don't have to worry about it the rest of the time.
They do exist, they're just rare and hard to find. (I have one, but I don't know how to find another.) Or you could do temp work. Or, you could change your definition of 'make a living' - I wanted to run this by Alicorn before I mentioned it, but once we're moved and settled in at the house I'm working on buying (which has hit a bit of a roadblock but should happen within 6 months), we'd be willing to have you visit for a month with an eye to figuring out whether the arrangement would work out long-term. You'd need to have enough income to cover food in the long term - probably about $200/month; cost of living is pretty nice here - and any other spending you wanted to do (notable: I have no interest in TV, so if you want cable you'll have to cover that; hulu seems to be a reasonable substitute tho), but you wouldn't need to pay rent if you were willing to pitch in by driving us places.
(If Crono isn't interested in this, or moves on, we may consider opening the offer up to other LWers, with a preference for those in similar need of being kicked out of a rut and likely to be amenable to an autistic-friendly lifestyle.)
I had to smile because of Adelene's offer. This is a great idea! The ETA from above also made me aware that the lifestyle advice on Less Wrong is quite unique in its sophistication.
If you do something that your parents would dislike that you'd have the freedom to do while living alone when they are at work (i.e. rearrange furniture like a poltergeist, not do the dishes for weeks, paint the walls) they can hold you responsible when you get home.
If you do something that your boss wouldn't like while you're not on the job (get in a heated argument with someone, make a mess) your boss won't know or care.
There's a big difference between the type of "answering" you have to do to a boss vs. a parent. It can be the case that parent's are more lenient, but it is also the case that their authority is everpresent.
I do agree that highly flexible jobs are difficult to find; I will note that my experience is that waking up early (I prefer a 2am bedtime, arbitrary sleep; I currently wake up at 6:30 am twice a week) is unpleasant (my alarm is set for 6am... I am usually late) but worth it for the autonomy/moneybuxx; but I don't mean to generalize from one example too much.
This is not necessarily true. For example, I've recently read about a campaign to remove a public school teacher because she also writes romance novels that contain sex scenes.
Public school teachers are public figures in a way that most employees aren't; at least at the lower grade levels, their primary job is arguably to keep the sixty-odd parents of their charges happy despite the vast tarpit of bias that makes up our childrearing instincts. Much of the depth of that tarpit relates to cultural values, so I'd say your example is very much a special case. It's hard to imagine the same campaign being aimed at, say, a NOC tech for Amazon or a sandwichifex at the local Quiznos.
True, it's not exactly unheard of for managers to take some interest in their employees' personal lives, and the rise of social media makes this easy to do if the inclination exists and hard to beg out of. But despite this, I'd say magfrump's got it about right on average: the ways in which your boss will try to manage your life generally don't have very much intersection with parental behavior, and if they do I'd suggest looking for another job.
There are indeed downsides, but my feeling is that if you got a job and moved out, you would afterwards ask yourself "Why the hell didn't I do this sooner?!"
One concrete point in favor of being self-supporting is that even if your first job is crappy, your next one will be marginally better, and so on. Right after high school I worked at a fast food restaurant. Then I worked in a bookstore, then doing telephone tech support, and now I'm a computer programmer. (I don't have any degree.)
By the way, I worked in that fast food job for four years. That was too long, but at the time I was too lazy and too scared to look for something else.
My experiences with jobs have been pretty bad. The "technical" jobs I've had were rather unpleasant experiences, and the two times I had "menial" jobs, I was fired in under a week.
Keep trying! Technical job pleasantness has a very large standard deviation.
Yes yes yes, that's exactly what I wanted to say!
Wow, this is insanely relevant to my life.
In particular, it clarifies the cause of my increasing frustration with a certain associate.
Deliberately avoiding details, much of my interaction with this person feels like moving backwards in terms of autonomy. I've been feeling slightly guilty about my growing resentment, because they are (truly, from their perspective), "just being helpful".
This comment matches my experience extremely well; reflecting on the periods in my life when I've felt the best, they were often precipitated by a (sometimes involuntary) increase in autonomy - moving out, moving to a foreign country, etc.
Your comment has made my emotional state less opaque. So thanks!
I'm the opposite. If I can delegate any decision to anyone, I will. I couldn't care less about personal autonomy.
Do you expect that that would continue to be true if you were in a situation where you had no choice but to accede to others' decisions?
Choosing to avoid making choices looks like personal autonomy to me.
Probably. If they went crazy with it, I'd eventually dislike it, but if they made the same choices I would have made, I'd be fine.
When other people do make choices for me, I won't try to find out how much they're willing to force the issue unless I'm planning on doing something else.
Does this apply to tasks as well as decisions (e.g. you don't care how the laundry is done as long as you don't have to be involved) or are you just really amenable to instruction?
I would also like people to do things for me if that's what you mean, but given that I have to do it myself, I'd prefer someone else tell me what to do.
The second happiest time on my life (and the longest time of extended happiness) was the first 3 weeks or so after I moved out of my parent's home and into my own unit, first job, supporting myself.
(For the record, the happiest was a week-long beachside holiday with an extended group of friends. Social interaction is really, really good.)
For me, at least, it's less about being able to avoid demands (I got pretty good at that while I was a kid, actually) and more about being able to make meaningful choices and not having to convince other people to go along with everything I want to do.
I'm the same age, and in a similar situation to you. I'm not self-reliant yet, but I'm living in my grandfather's house who recently passed away, so now I'm going through the transition process of living on my own. My problem is trying to find a job and an apartment where I can sustain myself. This seems to be impossible without a college degree.
For several years I was working entry-level jobs (retail; telephone tech support) and living by myself. The "trick" was that I shopped around for a place with low rent. (This may be harder where you live. I'm in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan.)
Right now I'm a computer programmer, despite not having any degree.
Good luck (and sorry about your grandfather).
Yep, that's what I'm looking for doing at the moment. There are places around here for around $400/month; but first I'm trying to find a place with a somewhat higher wage.