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  1. ribbonfarm8/17/1740 min
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    ribbonfarm
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    • bartadamley3 years ago

      This essay cuts deep!

      Premium mediocrity is dressing for the lifestyle you’re supposed to want, in order to hold on to the lifestyle you can actually afford for now while trying to engineer a stroke of luck.

      That inventing the future means showing up to help sustain the fiction while it is being built out. It means taking risks to make money, meaning, or both.

      Risking it for money, meaning or both... this is really what the process of inventing the future looks like . . . having this awareness is something anyone seeking to take a chance on themselves must be aware of!

    • erica5 years ago

      Love these lines:

      "You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do." "Humans come alive the moment somebody believes in them enough to invest in them."

      I am such a Maya, a risk-taker who wants it all. I absolutely believe you can have both meaning and money. I called that "premium mediocre" and "basic" were the same from the beginning so felt validated to read that!

      I'm moving from Brooklyn to The Bay Area in a few days, so this is close to home: "Even if you know nothing else, you know to move to San Francisco or New York."

    • chronotope5 years ago

      This is pretty excellent. Perhaps the best and most accurate thing I've read this month. That said, I disagree with the ending. I'm not so sure we'll get a happy ending, no matter how many fake it to make it.

      • jeff5 years ago

        I really enjoyed this piece as well. Thanks so much for sharing. I've never heard of ribbonfarm before and I'm eager to check out their other articles.

        I agreed with the happy ending, but I'm also an Objectivist programmer with a small bit of cryptocurrency so I guess that might be expected. Still, I can't decide whether I identify most with Maya, Molly or Max. I'd like to think I'm a Maya that is actually striving in my engineered opening, but I'm afraid I might be a Molly on a fast track to becoming a Max.

        • chronotope5 years ago

          I think there are a decent number of people who are engineering track Mayas. Especially those that come out of non-traditional backgrounds. But there too there is a severe divide between levels and types of engineers.