It's nice of you to worry about me, but I really do have a life

Viliam
Mon, 04 May 2026 21:14:00 GMT

I have two shameful secrets that I probably shouldn't talk about online:

I love my family.

I enjoy my hobbies.

"What an idiot!" you probably think. "Doesn't he realize that at his next job interview, HR will probably use an AI that can match his online writing based on a short sample of written text, and when they ask 'hey AI, is this guy really 100% devoted to his job, and does he spend his entire days and nights thinking about how to make his boss more rich?', the AI will laugh and print: 'beep-boop, negative, mwa-ha-ha-ha'."

And, hey, I get it. If I had a company, and I could choose between two people who are about equally qualified, but for one of them, working hardest for me is the true meaning of his life, while the other one hopes to collect his salary and then go home and spend the rest of his day with his wife and children, I would also prefer to hire the former.

Which is why so many of us pretend to be the former. Even when we are not. Because we prefer that our families not starve. Thus the job interviews often become humiliating exercises in lying.

"Hey, you don't mind doing a little overtime, do you?"

"Heh (nervous smile), uhm, no I don't. It's (deep breath) okay. (Oh my god, did I sound enthusiastically enough???)"

"Sometimes we will send you on a business trip for a week or more. Our company benefits include team building activities during weekend, and once in a week the entire office comes for a beer together after work, you know, to have some fun and social activities."

"Ah (oh fuck, that means the company will also take away some of my evenings, weekends, sometimes entire weeks at a time), that sounds nice (damn, I really need this job)."

"That's nice to hear, because at this company, we are like one big family. We are all really passionate about making the company grow. There is no place here for that kind of lazy people who just want to do their 9-5, collect their paycheck and go."

"Ha ha... of course, that... heh... is definitely not who I am, don't worry. (Is there actually a life before death, or is this all there is?)"

*

Wikipedia article: Preference falsification

*

This is not meant to blame people who naturally find their jobs to be their greatest hobby. Enjoy your luck; I mean it. Sometimes I wish I was one of you.

This is just my attempt to pierce the bubble of the preference falsification. You are surrounded by many people who claim to be the same as you. Many of them are lying. They are trying to survive in an environment that would strongly prefer if there was less of them, and more of you. (And perhaps in the age of em, this dream will become true.)

The reason I am writing this is because I feel constantly gaslighted when I read articles about how jobs give meaning to life, and how UBI would be a truly horrible idea, even in the age of full automation, because people would suffer existential horror and emptiness, therefore a truly compassionate government would have to create artificial scarcity and suffering and bullshit jobs, to save people from themselves.

Eh... I don't want to generalize from one example. The thing that I am preaching here is that people are different, so... maybe there actually are many people like that.

But I am not one of them. (And I suspect there might be other people like me.)

If you gave me a perpetual UBI starting tomorrow, I would quit my job, and spend my days with my family, my friends, and doing my hobbies. And I would be much happier than I am today! I would consider my life better, more full of meaning. Because I find the meaning outside of my job, in my free time. I just wish I had more of that free time.

If you tell me: "Hey, no one owes you anything. Why should anyone give you money for free? You need to provide value in return for the resources you consume; and when the AI outcompetes you, then you deserve to die; you should have been smarter and luckier and probably born rich to start your own AI company," then all I can say is: "Fair point."

But if you tell me: "Hey, it's actually better for you to live in a constant worry about tomorrow, to spend your days doing the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and filling it, over and over again, to wish you had more than isolated fragments of time for all the things you actually consider meaningful," then my answer is: "No. Fuck you."

Stop telling me what my preferences are. You are wrong.

Oh, and please stop this bullshit about "revealed preferences". We all know it's just a fancy term for the just-world fallacy.

"It's not fair that black people are slaves." -- "Don't worry, it means they have a revealed preference to be slaves. Otherwise, they wouldn't be." -- "But they say..." -- "Hypocrites."

"Keynes said that in hundred years the productivity would increase so much that we would only need to work 3-day work weeks." -- "Well, I guess people have a revealed preference to work 5-day work weeks." -- Sure, smart guy. Show me where can I find the job advertisements for the 3-day work week jobs. Oh, there are none! So from the fact that I didn't choose from an empty set you can figure out what my true desire is. Amazing!

*

Next time someone tries to organize an experiment about how people live on UBI, pick me! I will show you how it is done properly. I am willing to bet my own soul on it.

If I am wrong, then liberating me from the endless cycle of semi-bullshit jobs will destroy me. I will sit at home, motionless, looking at an empty wall. Then kill myself with alcohol and drugs. (Or... whatever it is that people without meaning of life do in your fantasies.)

But if I am right, you will find me laughing, doing my own projects, having fun with my family and friends, traveling, playing, reading books, watching movies, vibe coding, playing computer games, blogging, meeting people, volunteering, probably a few more things that I don't even have the capacity to think about now.

Even a 50:50 chance of either outcome sometimes feels like a bet worth taking. Because the alternative is 100% certainty of wasting most of my time doing the things I hate.

Oops... I really screwed up by saying this out loud, did I?

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