5 Comments

What exactly is this program that can save finance companies millions of dollars????

Expand full comment
author

prob better to talk about this in the DMs

Expand full comment

You can keep your sinecure and build something else on the side while your bills are covered.

Expand full comment
author

This is true, and that was my plan. But I never built anything. Looking back, I think my subconscious motivation was to earn money and increase optionality. And the sinecure was abetting this, therefore I didn't feel any need to build anything else. This motivation gets more locked in the longer you stay in it. I needed to separate earning money from motivation. If earning money is easy, why do anything else that's hard?

"The longer you spend on a path that isn’t yours, the longer it takes to find a path that is." - Paul Millerd

The other philosophical question is why do sinecures exist and why do people look down on people who pursue their interests? If you find something valuable, isn't it more likely someone else will also? And if something is useless, why are people paid to do it?

Expand full comment

The motivation is simply to learn things that you don't learn in your sinecure. So, the push is curiosity.

Why do sinecure jobs exist? This world doesn't compensate effort or skills based on individually perceived value: the industry you work in is the single most important factor relative to how much you are paid. If you are in a growing industry, you get paid a lot to do little. As long as you can engineer a role for yourself in one of those places, your financial challenges are taken care of. It's not a fit for everybody, but it's possible.

I agree there's a threshold. It comes a moment when, if you've been in one of those positions for too long, change might sound not only insurmountably hard but also unappealing. I think that threshold these days is set at no later than 45 years old (no data to back this up, so feel free to call BS 😅).

Expand full comment