i’m writing this on Saturday morning, during those few precious hours per week when my mind can wander. when i am not managing 25 people, SSH’d into 2 servers, debugging customer tickets, counting beans.
loser A
what you intuitively understand. these people have no skills, ambition, or passion. they are rudderless. more likely, they were given a rudder, then they burned it. fools. but this is not the type of loser i want to discuss. why punch down on Saturday?
loser B
these people actually look like winners. they may have a highly paid job, family, social influence, good health. but there is something creeping underneath — hatred.
more specifically, hatred for that which doesn’t fit their world view. they traverse from “in my opinion” to “ought not” and finally, “shall not,” faster than AGI.
if they spot a profitable business, but they would not be a customer, they declare the business immoral. when they learn something you don’t know, they pity you for not knowing, despite the obvious (that you also know things they don’t, and life is an exchange).
this type of loser is harder to spot because ostensibly, they have things figured out. they avoid cocaine and hookers. but inside, they are conflict.
normal
as i think about starting a family, one word activates my resonant frequency. i want my kids to be normal.
years ago i’d have thought, “my son will be a 10x engineer.” or “my daughter will skip 3 grades in school.” but i don’t care about any of that now. i interact with so many type-B losers that my greatest parental gift will be a well rounded childhood, open-mindedness, and high regard for hard work. the rest is downstream.
are you a loser?
admittedly, one catalyst for this post was Tim Walz making jokes about the destruction of an American company’s market cap, despite his state’s retirement fund holding 1.6m shares of Tesla stock. Tim is a loser.
another catalyst was a guy who, last week, posted in multiple forums that my former company Fomo was fraudulent, and called me a “does anything to win” kind of founder, despite knowing nothing about me. Michael Lynch (mtlynch.io) is a loser.
and a 3rd for good measure. perhaps the example underscoring everything above. you already know it, actually. the infamous Dropbox qualms.
- “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially“
- “it doesn’t actually replace a USB drive“
- “It does not seem very ‘viral’ or income-generating“
Dropbox is worth billions of dollars. meanwhile BrandonM is still working.
once you see this type of loser, you cannot unsee it. but you can definitely choose to not be it.
I know some people (i.e. haters/losers) miss this point b/c they despise her books/worldview– which of course have many limits as all things do– but Ayn Rand’s protagonists provide a good model here: they are builders and they don’t snipe. Only the “second handers” have time for that shit– forever criticising for want of a viable solution they can’t or won’t endeavor to provide like these HN fools. The heroes in her books are too busy creating to do anything else.
thinking about the types and I wonder if maybe tim walz is only appearing to be a type 2 because he is operating in politics. i don’t know anything about him specifically but i do think politicians have a different win condition that requires them to operate differently. this isn’t an argument that he isn’t a type 2, but more that he is intentionally doing that from a place of greater political ambition.
i suspect his emotions are driving his behavior, which may be a third type of loser.