from Hacker News

“Rich man vs. fisherman on beach” is a flawed parable

by george_ciobanu on 5/12/23, 3:59 PM with 4 comments

You may have read this story on HN or somewhere else: fisherman hangs out at the beach all day, and the rich man works hard all his life to get to the same place (https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherman/).

Except the parable doesn't think through a few super important things.

1. Children If you have them you need money to raise them, send to college etc. Fishing isn't going to cut it.

2. Backup If you've saved money and you get ill or have some other kind of emergency you can use the savings. But if you've just been living paycheck to paycheck (or fishcheck?) and you get some health issue you're kind of screwed (at least in the US).

3. Work can be meaningful I haven't loved all my jobs but a lot of them were quite rewarding. I do like to fish, but it's never been quite as intellectually stimulating or rewarding as solving a complex people & systems problem, or as educational.

  • by dmbche on 5/12/23, 4:07 PM

    This is a parable - it's "hyperbole" in a sense I guess, to show the meaning in a few sentences.

    It's not saying we should all fish for a living. It's saying don't miss the forest for the trees - keep your end goal in mind.

    Think about what you are actually working for, and optimise for that. That's the point of the parable.

    If your dream life is fishing everyday on a beach, should you make an empire to have the free time to do it or should you just fish?

  • by jaclaz on 5/12/23, 4:18 PM

    Only for the record, this story (in many localizations/with small changes) derives from Heinrich Böll:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...

    and it is usually classified as satire/humour.

    Maybe you (as well as some people that are re-posting/talking about it) are giving to it a relevance/importance it didn't originally have.

  • by Nicholas_C on 5/14/23, 3:17 AM

    The takeaway of this parable isn’t that we should all become fishermen, it’s that we should slow down a bit and work to live instead of live to work.

  • by b20000 on 5/14/23, 4:46 AM

    go to the amazon jungle you will see that none of this matters and people still live in peace and survive nature and the earth provide for you and you can find medicine in plants the issue is that all of this is lost to modern society