Denial of income race manifesto

Introduction

The internet industry today is plagued by a particular type of egotism: arm race on the income and use it to boost self esteem. For the majority of them troubled by this mindset, the income has little practical impact(If given 100K USD, they would immediately invest it, rather than consume it). While it’s OK to use monetary income to indicate success and get motivated in a short period, years of such pursuit will significantly damage one’s psychological health. This manifesto will demonstrate the mechanism of such rat race, its harm and how to escape from this dreadful self-destruction.

Arm race on personal income

The income arm race stems from a universal human psychology: the desire to be important. I think this desire has done far more good than evil to the human race collectively. It’s also a net positive for most individual lives. But like all strong power, when not channelled well, this psychology is the root cause of many self-destruction as well.

Everyone has the tendency to compare with everyone else, intentionally or subconsciously. I think this is a result of evolution. Personal income is an important aspect for the working class(more than 99.9% of the human race), so It’s unnatural if we were not drawn to this question: how’s my income compared to my peers?

Over the years, this question and the answer began to grow fast inside. They became our top worries:

• Is my total compensation a fair one?
• Am I underpaid because of my incapabilities or because of the unfairness of the organization?
• What’s the income of others? What’s my rank in my peers?
• How to get my income to the next level?
• How can I be a millionaire, multi-millionaire or billionaire?

I think all those questions are legit ones to ask. But none of them are really high priorities in our lives. More importantly, if they become one’s priorities for an extended period(years), I can’t find a version of reality where his life is not ruined.

Sadly, raising income to beat others has become the most popular topics in the Internet discussion. This is especially true on anonymous forums like Blind where the ‘TC or GTFO’ reply is popular. This phrase rudely requests the original poster to disclose her total compensation. Anyone who has been using Blind will agree income and job level comparison feels like an arm race and promote a strong feeling of falling behind and stress.

From arm race to rat race

First and foremost, I think it doesn’t take much education to realize that lives dominated by the income arm race are pathetic. This reason alone should make up our minds of quitting it as any extremely toxic habit like smoking, drinking or eating fast food. Nonetheless, I would illustrate from a logical perspective.

The cycle of ‘motivation -> effort -> satisfaction’ is the archetype of all self development. However, unlike healthy cycles, the satisfactory response to income/wealth increase is logarithmic rather than linear. This is because:

Income rank’s advancement from per dollar income increase decays exponentially

This is obvious if you look at any income distribution(for example US). In 2020, you need only $702 more income to boost your rank from top 77% to top 78%, but to raise from top 98% to top 99%, you need $104,720 more, which is 149 times higher than the 77% to 78% leap.

How does the psychological satisfaction from income respond to our income? As we’ve pointed out, the satisfaction is essentially feeding one’s ego, so it’s hardly any exaggeration to say the satisfaction doesn’t respond to absolute income at all, but only responds to income rank. The response is also logarithmic, but I think it’s fine to approximate it with linear function. This is because for the majority of our lifetime, our income range doesn’t really change much. Without this approximation, the decay effect will be even more drastic.

With the above reasoning, we find that

Incremental satisfaction from higher income decays exponentially

When our career begins, the income grows fast with our experience, but it won’t be long before the power law begins to take control. To get the same level of satisfaction, the income must grow at a significant exponential pace(like 10% to 20%) for our lifetime. This is not practical for the vast majority of the population.

The same response curve is behind drug/alcohol abuse. If we became dependent on the satisfaction from income rank advancement, the power law mechanism is guaranteed to break the ‘motivation -> effort -> satisfaction’ cycle, dealing huge psychological harm to individuals in the process. Yet, many of us are already so much addicted to it, they respond to the eagerness by exerting more effort. For the vast majority of them, the incremental investment, albeit a huge and usually unhealthy one in their lives, is still linear in nature, thus won’t help them win the game.

This is when the arm race eventually became a rat race: we spend way more than it’s worth to play a game we can never win, yet we keep on spending.

Denial of the rat race

At this point, if you don’t agree the income race will make you a pathetic person, I hope you are rational enough to realize the power law mechanism behind the race and agree with the principle: Whenever possible, stay on the same side of power law(like using compound interest to grow wealth). Always avoid fighting against it which almost guarantees a failure. It’s called power law for a reason.

However, the above understanding is not enough. Because we need other motivations to replace the income rat race. I wish everyone could find something worthy to devote all their careers to. The truth is, that takes time and the majority of us will not be able to find such meaning in our lives. Even if we could, that mission may not be fulfilled because sometimes we have to fight against power law, although the fight will be worth it if the mission is.

Like most us won’t be top 1% wealthy, a huge percentage of mankind eventually can’t live up to their dreams, whatever they are. The good news is, everyone of us, after consistent efforts, will become the person we want to become. Isn’t that amazing? I use this to motivate myself everyday: am I getting close in the aspects I care most about? How can I be better?

Specifically, I want to be a person with the following qualities:

• Educated and knowledgeable
• Healthy
• Empathetic and enabling
• Responsible
• Self-disciplined
• Courageous to do the right thing

All these years, I’ve made tremendous progress in all those areas. I started fairly behind in some. For some examples, I used to have a very bad habit of over-promise and under-deliver. Now I’ve learned a principle of reject fast and agree slowly to make being responsible easier. I used to get up after 9am and have my work schedule to dominate my time. Today I get up from 5:30am to 6:30am which provides me with abundant time for my most important routine(I aim to move the schedule earlier to 4:30am). After lots of learning and practice on human skill, I turned myself from someone hard to work with and clueless about collaboration to a capable practitioner of influence skills and seeing it doing wonders all the time.

Those progress gave me at least as great gratification as I get from a big leap in income or wealth. At the end of the day, being a better person is closely related to a brighter future, regardless how you define better and brighter.

I wish everyone will make progress towards the person he or she wants to become, every single day.