Good story. And sad. But still not following Mom's advice and betting on something that has a very small chance of success.

I wonder how much salary he is giving up to get that lottery ticket?

He seems to have writing skills, which is a useful skill, but with very little "resume fluff" to prove it. A white-collar job looks down upon even 6-months of unemployment... seeing years and years of unemployment / odd jobs is just a giant red mark.

Even if someone is fully qualified, you are simply going to favor the resume with a "solid work history" over someone with a whole bunch of holes.

Startups on the other hand, cannot afford that luxury. They often need the skills immediately and don't about those sorts of matters as much.

He clearly has real world working experience. But any resume that is missing out on even a couple of months worth of experience signals a red flag to me.

This is the culture of corporate America. Holes are EXTREMELY bad in your resume. Period.

Is it a fear of non-compliance?

Holes in a resume are bad because most people who look at resumes think that holes are a bad thing. Its simply the bias that exists in most jobs (that I've come across... anyway)

you are a lazy piece of shit

you were incarcerated for bank robbery

you were on the run from the Feds living in Argentina

you went to Pakistan to attend a Jihadist training course (BTEC-diploma)

you were kidnapped by aliens and given daily anal probes (that never impresses the interviewers)

you were being trained in cutting-edge industrial espionage techniques by a rival company of the interviewer

you spent the time going through sex-reassignment procedures and changed your name to Gladys

you worked for the NSA

The average interviewer will think all of the above and more in the space of two milliseconds, whether any of these delusional thoughts have any basis in reality.

From reading HN I get the impression he'd have very little chance because of his age. This guy has white hair, and posters here seem to think that over 26 is past it.

Guess what? In that case you have to be smart enough, for survival purposes, to make something up. For god's sake you can say you are a consultant. Or say you worked at a company that recently went out of business. And if you get caught later? Who cares by then you will have hopefully used it as a stepping stone to something else. Of course if you want to be honest you can continue to live on the street and hope for the best.

I am not doubting that it is difficult if you are living w/o a home to present an image that is consistent with that (so maybe you need to get a job care taking a property in order to have a place to live and using a po box) but it is not impossible. Very hard but not impossible.

Suggestion: Lie."

Nonetheless, it is lying, and that has its own risks associated with it. Beyond honor, if people notice that you are lying on your resume, you start getting added to blacklists and those blacklists start spreading around.

You see, if you fail the typical interview, you are simply not hired. If you LIE in the typical interview, and the interviewer notices it, you may be banned for life from that company.

This is doubly-so for consultants. Consultants are sold based on their resume. IE: They may have found a Government Contract position that requires 3 years of experience, and naturally... they'll then look for people with 3 years of experience. They may be put in a very perilous legal position, and their Government Contract may be terminated. You aren't only putting yourself at risk here, but also the company that just hired you.

PS: its much much worse now that Mr. Snowden ruined it all for Contractors without a degree and little experience. Mr. Snowden has been cited explicitly as a case WHY you don't hire non-graduates.

http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/15200/blacklist...

http://www.hazards.org/victimisation/bigliars.htm

Where did I say anything about the bias, resume holes, people trying to survive, or judgement of the unemployed person, exactly?

"Sir, are you sure you want stack loaves of bread here at Trader Joe’s? Yes, I really do. Well, we’ve decided to hire the 24 year-old woman with purple hair and nose piercings instead."

He tried to get more traditional jobs, but they don't want him.

And the example he is giving is for dramatic effect anyway. We have no statistics on how many jobs he applied for that he was overqualified for but more on the mark that made sense for the person hiring (like writing for priceonomics on a per article basis).

Why? I worked my way thru school in retail and then a short stint in retail management (long enough to learn I'm not doing that for a living if there's any way to avoid it...)

So our annual turnover rate ranged from 100% to 200% and this was not considered noteworthy in the biz. Retail is not like working for Ma Bell for 40 years and retiring in place. This dude was unemployed and/or homeless for what, like 5 years, at what point do you think a retail manager will think, hmm, he's been unemployed 10 times longer than the average employee lasts here, maybe, just maybe, he's going to stick around?

The other pure bogosity is I actually worked retail management and my three favorite employees were a carpenter and two accountants. God knows he wouldn't be the first dude trying to work a second job part time nights to make ends meet, and managers love to hire a guy (or woman) who the boyz will look up to as something of a parental figure or at least older bro figure (basically they were team leads working under me). High school kids were a dime a dozen but the store really rose or fell based on the adults...

You never, ever hire some high school or college student slacker if you can get a real dude with a real work ethic. Strange claims from people who haven't been there, while I have been there, strike a discordant tone.

Gotta be some "other" issues. Such as maybe 100 other applicants in the same situation who did get hired. Perhaps this "Rosanne" show writer didn't get hired because they hired a dude from the "Cosby show" or 100 other guys in the same situation.

I guarantee he didn't get hired because the kids would obey him like a parent, or because he had too intense of a work ethic, or too much life experience, or too focused on the prize aka paycheck.

You're right on average. Interestingly, one of the part-timers at my local (Menlo Park) Trader Joe's is apparently a retired multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur. He does it just to be around friendly people for part of his day.

Sure it's slightly immoral but if you plan to stay for a longtime and it's the only way to feed your family...

quite honestly anyone who takes two years off when their career is at peak potential shouldn't be surprised at anything career-wise that happens from that point forward. all bets are off when you just check the f out for 2 years.

how many successful people could take 2 years off from their work and expect things to be fine when they come back? this line of (non-) reasoning is sheer lunacy.

go ahead, give yourself a 2 year break.

Let alone taking a 2 year break. If you are not having side projects which you work after office hours, late night and weekends.

If you are not learning quickly, adapting or improving your skills fast enough. You are setting yourself up for disaster.

We aren't talking about buggy whips here. There are jobs in that industry. Who do you think are getting those jobs? People who are stupid and lazy?

Of course a rising tide floats all boats. And of course it would have been better if he was an in demand programmer in SF. But most people aren't. And this is something they do need to deal with.

People who are young and cheap. It says so right in the article.

It's just that, when you're taking moonshots, you should expect to miss most of the time. When you're tired of failing, you can go back to school, or start in a new career field. The gaps in your resume are there, but they're forgivable. You were hungry and foolish then, but you're ready to eat and learn now.

As others have noted, those gaps hurt a lot more when they appear later on. It's not fair, but it's just the way it is, unfortunately. Even if you were on your way to 20 years of employment at your stable dream job, layoffs can happen. Shit can happen. Count on it.

What struck me was sitting in a library surfing the web. I'd much rather sit in the library and read books. If his description of the days being so long an boring and lonely for the homeless, does it make sense to start a program to read to them for a couple of hours a day. It won't be boring and it could be educational.

Unlikely.

Have you ever been seriously ill, and nothing that doctors seem to do is working? Have you been in a super shitty situation with massive amounts on uncertainty surrounding it?

The problem is people are so eager, and their energies are so much more spent in worry and anxiousness that stuff like 'book reading project' will be least of their priorities. All the time its like- Will this cure help? Can I get a job here? Can I move to somewhere cheaper?

From his perspective the priorities would have been, finding information or some lead or a job posting that can get him his next meal, a place to live, a long term solution to his problems.

A book reading project? People can't focus on reading a news paper correctly when are tensed and anxious. Such things are for the time of peace.

But I love reading, so there's that :)

Because you see in 2001 software and the internet looked like a "declining industry" as you put it. The dot-com bust made the idea that software would revolutionize the world look like so much idiocy.

Anyone who took Gates' advice is doing VERY well right now. But there was loads of skepticism in that audience, and lots of questions about offshoring.

My point is, it is incredibly hard to tell what will be a "declining industry" even five years forward. There's no way this guy would have known that television writing would get nuked by reality television.

Also, I hope people who read your comment don't make the mistake of thinking they can necessarily avoid this sort of misfortune simply by being smart enough.

So many students reasoned the exact opposite, though, and avoided CS because of the recent bubble.

I'd have pursued CS whatever the economy, though. I'm just lucky my take was right and my timing was lucky.

In other words, the fact that these once huge industries were rapidly declining is a great argument for an increased social safety net.

The major takeaway from the article is that he fell into the same trap that a lot of us did in the 90s, that the future was so bright you had to wear shades. I had no idea the 2000s were going to be so dang BLEAK.

Now we have a two-tier economy where the companies making money make a lot of money and everyone else makes small money. We also have saturation in just about every market, filled by people who have recognized the small money and rejected it for the suffering it requires. And then we have the rest of the world coming up, so that it's more difficult to stand on others's shoulders and skim income from their labor (a good turn of events in my book). I don't know what all of this means or what the future holds. All I know is that if we rely on the free market to figure all of this out, the future is social darwinism. We'll have billions of souls struggling to find food and shelter instead of contributing their unique gifts to the betterment of humanity.

The government creates bubble after bubble causing enormous amounts of economic dislocation in the housing market, college loans, healthcare, and on and on... and your conclusion is that somehow the free market is the problem or at very least not the solution?

contributing their unique gifts to the betterment of humanity

No system throughout history has ever contributed more to the "betterment of humanity" than the free market.

As with so many things, Friedman said it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

You can't make a statement like this and use it as a premise for something else and not expect to have to defend it as a statement unto itself. Given this is an extreme position you're going to have to have an extremely good argument for it for anyone to take it seriously.

But assuming that the government does cause all "bubbles", why is it understandable that during such times market participants should start behaving irrationally, against their own best interests? Markets can solve anything, except bubbles caused by the government?

it's just that a lot of the crises listed are to me less "political corruption and collusion with financiers and more the road to hell being paved with good intentions. ending political corruption is feasible, ending good intentions?

Things would be less bad if just one unlucky event in a crisis wasn't enough to destroy the entire life of somebody, but it is, so we must play russian roulette every few years.

Anyway, I'm quite sure reducing the government intervention will replace this problem with something worse (that we can check on history books), thus the solution has to come from some other kind of change.

Wow, I'm not really sure what to say to that unless you mean that you can end political corruption by destroying the power base of government so that taking advantage of government doesn't mean much.

My Homeowners' Association doesn't really have any significant corruption, but that's really just because they don't have much power or money to control.

Whenever you concentrate large amounts of power, you will have corruption. That is as axiomatic as any part of life on Earth.

Also notice that the housing crash happened just as all the baby boomers' children go off to college and they decide to down-size from their McMansions since they are empty-nesters now.

Thirdly notice how now medical expenditures nationwide are climbing greatly now that they are all becoming old and sickly. The next 10-15 years are a great time to be in the medical field, even with ObamaCare. But then as they die off it will be a horrible place to try to get a job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization...

Since the bubble burst, what corrections has the free market made to prevent there isn't another one?

So much of the rhetoric about "free markets" seems to come from looters who resent the government eliminating ways to make money by rent-seeking, collusion and fraud rather than producing useful goods.

(edit: fixed link)

What does the free market care about bubbles? We've seen time and time again that the free market optimizes for "this quarter", not "this decade". If it means a crash a year from now, so what, let's just be sure to enjoy the ride and try to skim what we can before it hits!

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/secular-stagnati...

[1]for comparison, in the UK, "success" as a comedy writer is getting the equivalent of $8,000 per episode total to write a standard six episode series which makes it onto BBC, and then getting another set of six next year before your show gets cancelled. Needless to say, you can earn less from radio, or co-writing, and most comic writers that aren't also actors have other income sources (and smaller families)

I don't buy this. He knew that writer's jobs rarely lasted into their 50's. He knew the end was coming but didn't save enough, and continued to spend 400k per year while being unemployed.

What happened to agricultural commodity prices in the Roaring 1920s began happening to almost human labor (except high-end private-sector social climbing) around 1998.

Badly managed plenty (in the '20s, in food; in the '90s, in services in general) leads to a catastrophic depression. If excellence-maximizers are in control, people see better uses for the freed-up resources. But the ones who succeed in human organizations tend to be the boring cost-cutter type, and if those sorts of people are in control, then growth (paradoxically?) leads to meltdown and widespread poverty.

Was it worth it, NO

My startup failed about 5 years ago now, and I went and got a real job that was fortunately a step up from where I was before a startup. But for about my first year or two on the job, I felt like I was behind everyone who had joined straight out of college and now knew all the ropes much better than I did.

That flipped after about 2 years at the company, though. By then I knew the company's internal systems as well as anyone else, but I also had this great skill base on how to build things from scratch, how to identify problems that needed fixing without anyone telling me, and how to take initiative and plan out a solution. Many of those skills became invaluable later on, as I started tackling harder problems, while my peers often became frustrated because they were 5+ years out of college and the only thing they'd ever known was how to fix bugs and implement features in one server of one company.

I listed a bunch in the post - "how to build things from scratch, how to identify problems that needed fixing without anyone telling me, and how to take initiative and plan out a solution". Most people who have built things on their own before assume "Duh, anyone should be able to do that" - but the reality is that most people cannot, and there is a painful learning curve and a lot of feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy when they try. The first time I tried to build something on my own, back in college, I certainly floundered around for years until I persevered through and launched it. Many people have not had that experience, and when faced with it, they shy away.

As he says in the article:

I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation

This type of thing keeps me up at night. Should I take the night off watching a TV show or get more work done? Should I go to every single one of my kids' activities or should I spend some of them at home working? Having grown up relatively poor, I don't want to return to that and stories like this are scary.

That's really secondary though, step one is to not have 8 kids.

Really shows how intelligence and common sense are two different things.

Or making decisions based on emotionality and what you want.

Just because you want 8 kids (or 5 or whatever) doesn't mean it's a good idea to have that many kids.

And just because you think your passion is being a comedy writer doesn't mean it's a good idea to take that career path or take that gamble.

I mean I would imagine it would have been possible when he was offered the dream job by Tom Arnold to look at it rationality (hard but possible) and know enough about the business to realize the gamble he was taking.

As opposed to the gamble that a person fresh out of college w/o kids or a family in the same "go for the brass ring" situation.

Having 8 kids does not have to be as expensive as you think. You can get clothes for next to nothing (or free if you are really poor), rooms can be shared, hand-me-down toys and clothes.

Food is really the only expense that multiplies. But if you are making big batches of food and using raw materials (large bags of rice, pasta or beans from Costco come to mind) it really does not have to be that expensive.

The author states how important it was to them to keep the kids in the best schools. This suggests that hey had fallen into a trap that many have. They believe that their kids will be better off if they have the best of everything (clothes, schooling, food, housing). This simply is not true. Look at what happened. The family was completely split into pieces. Some of the kids became almost foster kids. The mother abandoned some of the younger ones. Is this really better than a middle class family that stays together and has a lower standard of living?

The other part of this is, parents are fooled into thinking that they should work 60hrs a week so their kids will be better off. Their kids meanwhile are being raised by some strangers most of the time (day-care, after school care). The kids would rather just have the parent around than a bunch of extra toys, clothes and video games. The worst part is, the parent is not there teaching them haw to be upstanding and respectable men and women. Teaching them work ethic, discipline, values, morality, ETC.

How foolish this man was. He deserves the life he has been relegated to. His kids don't though - and I do feel sorry for them.

Disagree with me? This man made over 10 million dollars during his life and he is only in his early fifties.

I mean no pain no gain. If you want to win a race you have to train, right? In this case the race is making sure you have enough socked away so you can be financially secure if you ever lose your ib bank job. Or just making enough to live a nice life. Not having to worry about money is also a stress reliever and gives you one less thing to lose sleep over. Nobody ever lost sleep over working hard, right?

"Should I go to every single one of my kids' activities or should I spend some of them at home working?"

Well, when your kids get old-er they will care more about what you can do for them that requires money. Not whether you missed a game or not. I've had girlfriends in the past with parents that have been the parent at everything they do. And once the child reaches late high school or college age they care more that their friend has a vacation home and that their dad can't pay for college or buy them things. So I'm firmly in the camp of "miss the events and make money". Other will tell you differently. Not that kids whose parents aren't around don't whine or you won't find a kid who has a "rich" parent who says they would have rather spent more time with them. That's what they say. But the truth is that's short sighted.

Right on! When my father's job hook up in Dubai fell apart, he called my mom informing her that he can either return home to India to continue his struggling career or he can come to the US on a visit visa. My mom told him to take his chances and then spent hours tearing up, unclear how she was going to take care of four little kids.

It would take another seven years before my dad could get the rest of his family here. For all of that time, I barely knew my dad(there was no VoIP:). But the end result--or even the goal--made it all worth it.

Maybe it's that I have never had a rich parent to shower me with luxury, so it never seemed a reasonable thing to expect.

My advice to you is, give yourself some slack. Even if you make a few mistakes, it won't lead to catastrophic failure. Don't worry about work. Save your money dutifully, and go to your kids activities. You'll realize that there will always be opportunity as long as you're making good solid decisions. But you don't need to be working 24x7.

As a father, to be unable to support yourself, let alone your kids, can be a destructive blow not only to your self-respect, but to your children's respect for you. I suspect that that's what he was trying to avoid, and I find it wholly reasonable. His children's respect might never return, and it's clear from the article that his relationship with his children is part of what he valued most.

If it was easy to avoid the situation, he would have.

My father refused to take any real help, till his final days.

In his own words, he wanted to "free" his children from the burden he had turned into - he wanted us to go out and succeed & never blame him for holding us back.

All I could do was get him his pills and sit by his bed & promise him that it wasn't a sacrifice (and that I would live my life, soon).

Not that it did any good to his self-worth, but it helps me sleep well at night, at least.

He didn't blame anyone did he? He basically said he made all of the decisions, one by one. The source of those decisions may or may not have been what you propose as the explanation. But I think the characterization 'this article may have been unfairly billed and titled' seems...off, regardless. But maybe I'm missing something.

Why do you think his pride stopped him accepting help? Would you put up someone down on their luck?

I rode by a homeless person on the way to work today. This reminds me "there, but for the grace of God, go I". (Substitute whatever you like for the god word: fate, karma, etc.)

Sometimes it is good to be reminded that sometimes sh*t just happens. (And I know, he could have done things differently in terms of life choices, but he also had some really poor luck.)

I stopped reading there...

The best thing you can do is acknowledge its presence and build your defenses by prudently saving and spending.

It was a different time and all, but quitting your job completely when you have a large mortgage and 8 kids seems irresponsible. His eventual recovery is inspiring, but what would have happened to those 8 kids if his wife couldn't fall back on the German citizenship and its social safety net? This could have easily ended much worse for them.

"Yes, I, David Raether, the smart and funny guy who graduated with honors from college"

"I ... helped high school seniors write college essays"

"The other children have finished college or are nearing completion."

And his story about his college buddy who couldn't write a magazine.

Yup kids graduating with honors made me what I am today, a dude living in a '97 minivan... while the dropouts are startup billionaires and bartenders for famous people make $600K/yr, however temporarily.

I just thought the fixation on college was humorously extremely accurate and highly subversive.

His point was to illustrate that traditional predictors of success, including even prior success, don't guarantee you anything. He's really proud that his kids were able to receive strong traditional educations that led to college degrees and promising stable careers. How is that subversive?

I'm glad we agree on the subversive part of the story. There is a stereotypical middle class mantra always repeated unthinkingly that college is a universal good the purpose of which is to eat cash and excrete a credential that results in a good job and success, automatically, all the time, for all participants. Exactly the same Pavlovian thought conditioning process in go to church = go to heaven and several other peculiar beliefs.

Some of the comments posted before this one express puzzlement about his "homelessness" when, after all, he had immediate relatives who still had a house to live in. Many cases of people living on the street are cases of people who have untreated behavior disorders that make them very hard to live with, even for their immediate relatives who have living space. The case of the author here is a case of a man who was brought up (as I am sure, having come from the same generation) to feel that it is his responsibility to provide for his children, and not their responsibility to provide for him. He used to live in Minnesota, where there is lethal cold outdoors during winter, but he was homeless in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where it can feel cold at night but where the weather is liveable outdoors year-round. The author thought it was more dignified and honorable to live in a car or something else like that than to crash in his children's housing.

On the whole, I'm very impressed by this man's maturity of outlook and gracious recognition of other people's point of view. He acknowledges, as several comments here have pointed out, that he made inexpedient career decisions. For a while, as he also acknowledges, he was "married to his job," and didn't give his wife enough encouragement and support as she brought up their children. He isn't passing blame around, but accepting responsibility. He may be a failure in economic terms in recent years, but his attitude now is admirable and shows a capacity to grow and keep on learning in middle age.

Do any of us know what industry and what form of employment will be a sure thing twenty or thirty years from now? No. But we can be sure that life is full of surprises, which sometimes include setbacks or even complete failures. Being ready to bounce back and try again is a good capacity to develop during youth. It's a crucial capacity to continue to develop into middle age. Now I'm curious about the book[1] from which this article was excerpted. This is the kind of thing I'd like to read for myself, as advice from one dad to another, and the kind of thing I'd like my children to read to prepare for their own independent adult lives.

[1] Tell Me Something, She Said by David Raether

http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-Something-She-Said/dp/14936318...

Great comment but it's unclear to me how giving his wife encouragement and support as she brought up their children would have changed the outcome?

Are you saying they wouldn't have gotten divorced? And if they hadn't he would still have a place to live?

From my experience if you don't "bring home the bacon" spouses have little sympathy or care about little else. Money is a basic necessity.

The most important thing is earning a living. No spouse that I ever know of ever cared about how many ball games or how you helped around the kitchen or shared responsibilities if you don't bring home a paycheck.

As a supposedly honors college grad and well read and all that he surely has heard of the greek concept of moderation in all things etc. May have not made it into the essay for whatever reason.

If he talked back to his boss and "cut back" to 70 hours, he probably would still be in the biz, or maybe he would have been downsized for not being a team player. Who knows. But one certain result would have been being a parent or husband for ten more hours/week.

Some teams have to be small and be able to react quickly to very tight deadlines meaning high work intensity and long hours to remain just on top of what's going on in the environment.

What does seem to be non-negotiable is self-respect; I don't know anyone who can respect or care about someone who doesn't respect themselves. And as a man in contemporary American society, you get a lot of messages that you're worthless if you don't have a job. You don't have to buy into those messages, though.

I've also found that there's a high degree of selection bias in what spouses care about. If you always end up in relationships where people care about "bringing home the bacon", it's probably because you care about bringing home the bacon, and people tend to attract like-minded partners. There are many, many women who don't care about this.

1) Find work-life balance so you don't feel the need to take an extended sabbatical to spend time with your family.

2) Even if you really want to take time off to spend time with your family, being continuously earner is more important. Even $500k in savings disappears quickly if the job market turns.

Rather than separating over the lack of paycheck, he and his ex-wife chose to forgo his paycheck initially because the demands of his high-stress job did not leave room for his role as a husband and father. He did not work for two years by choice in order to be with his family.

When he wasn't able to go back, they continued on together as a family through foreclosure, living in a two-bedroom apartment as a family with 8 children. He didn't earn a paycheck for six years before they separated. It sounds like they continued on together until they were simply unable to pay for housing.

She took the younger children to Germany, where as citizens they had a good education system and social safety net to rely on, and he stayed in the States and kept in contact with the teenage kids so they could remain in the same high school.

These decisions do not reflect a spouse that simply does not care how many ball games her husband attended. They describe a team who consistently prioritized their children's stability and education over a paycheck or even their marriage.

"I provided for you and our 8 kids for 15 years but it's pretty much OK if you just want to go to live in Germany to sleep with another dude and leave me here to die alone by hunger just because now I'm hitting rock bottom economically"

Is not about love, is about being a fucking decent human being.

The falling in love with another man happened some years later still.

I find it apalling how ready people in this comment subtree are to villify a woman based on their ignorant misjudgement of the situation.

They were married and had been for a long time (i.e. demonstrably not a "sham marriage"). The husband would have got a permanent residency and work visa in Germany.

This guy was in a no win situation here. He was working 17 hours a day to provide for the family. And their expectation was that he could just provide, provide and provide. After they had enough of the money, they wanted his time. But after some time, they needed the money again. It more or less seems like this guy was treated like a money making machine who exists only to serve their purpose.

When he hit a bottom he was just abandoned. The wife went on some where and with someone who could provide further. The children felt its not their obligation to take of the father. While they expected it was father's obligation to care of them.

Ultimately this feels like classic 'Use and throw' attitude. He was used, and when he was no longer useful he was thrown. Frankly speaking if I were him, I would no longer want to keep any contact with that kind of people again.

Its likely if this guy gets rich again. His wife will suddenly discover love for him again. Children will suddenly find compassion for their father. Its just all about the money.

Also, read the damn article, fully.

I am talking from personal experience and many stories of my peers. In the modern Western society many men are isolated and do not talk to each other about their family problems. If they did they'd found out how similar their stories are - overworked, unappreciated by their wives with their kids brought up to despise them, quietly carrying the entire financial burden of the family on their backs.

Whilst the author had to pick up the pieces of spending gone out of control his entire "family" moved on. As soon as he became a liability instead of an asset his wife discarded him.

This is pretty much what men undergo around the world.

*Unless you are in India, where marriage is some super expectant type thing.

It wasn't foreseeable that demand for writers would be halved within the next two years and he would be completely unemployable. He left a strong job market with a very successful resume and returned to a to a job market with very little demand. Had he not left his job two years earlier, he may have ended up in this situation anyway.

His family didn't abandon him. They made by, looked for jobs, kept the house as long as they could. They moved into an apartment and continued doing what they could to keep going.

But once you can no longer pay for housing for your children nothing else matters. If you cannot solve that problem, the state will for you if you are lucky, or they will end up on the streets.

It would have been impossible for him and his wife to have lived together at this point. There is simply no family or friend who is able to take in 2 adults and 8 children at once. They had very few options at this point, and housing is a much easier problem to solve for smaller groups of people.

His wife didn't immediately abandon him for someone else. She stayed by his side for six years of no income, and then took responsibility for the younger children while he took responsibility for the older children. She moved around the world to provide for their younger children as best she could.

As far as his children are concerned, it simply isn't age-appropriate to expect high school students to financially provide for their parents. Even if they could have, it isn't what the author would have wanted. He made it very clear in the article that at this point in time, the goal was for his older children to graduate from the same high school with good grades and go to a good college. At best, his older children could have worked minimum wage jobs part time. This would not have fixed the father's long term unemployment, and would place a high risk on his children's grades (and future educational opportunities), along with a huge amount of financial stress and responsibility on his kids.

This article is a fairly accurate portrayal of how an upper-middle class family in the United States would handle poverty. The first priority is health (fortunately none of his children had major health issues), and after that maintaining education for the kids. Housing decisions are often made as a result of what is needed for education. The last thing you want is for the kids to drop out of school, leading them to work minimum wage jobs into adulthood. At that point short-term poverty can become generational.

The fact that he and his wife provided good education paths for all 8 of their children throughout this story is an incredible accomplishment for him and his wife. While their marriage may not have ended in death, I would not consider it a failure.

But it puts a dent in one's career path. I was a software engineer, but found it difficult afterwards to get back into development. So I did testing, systems admin, database maintenance, even teaching.

I hope your family can make your situation work out in ways that are good for all of you.

Yes, you're a team and split work, and both parties contribute - but that split can look different for different people. If you can afford it, why not take some time out to spend it with your children?

I was certainly grateful for their hospitality, however self-sufficiency, even if it comes to the extent of living in a car and scalping soccer tickets for a living, feels completely different than being a welfare case. As a result, I wasn't living in a car for lack of other options, but rather out of belief that I could create something by sheer will-power, and that I was going to do that come hell or high water. My homelessness was a matter of seeking something greater than myself, not being lost to poverty.

Sure, it wasn't convenient to live in a car, and it made some parts of life a little more complex. But you can read some Thoreau, realize how free you really are, and work on what you love and believe in every minute of every day. That's powerful, whether it's a startup or getting back on your feet.

Mitt Romney's father was on foodstamps, but used that help to catipult him. This is real life, you look for edges not to abuse them but to help them elevate you. You take financial aid to get a degree to elevate you. If you took fin aide just to game the system with no intention of actually studying and not paying off your loan, that is a different story. Do not confuse seeking out and taking advantage of help to progress with abusing help. People certainly do that but if you came from a disadvantaged background take any edge you get and use it to get you up that mountain.

Self-confidence is important when you are trying to accomplish something big, and feeling like someone else is bailing you out undermines that.

Everybody is different, but some people need to know they can bounce back from the hardest circumstances and the only way to do that is to face them head on as they come.

Its good if you have that safety net of friends and family to help out. Not everybody has that, and there is never a guarantee that you always will. This is where one would find comfort in knowing that even then, they can survive.

If you can survive the worst, your personal definition of impossible is redefined.

My buddy and I are interviewing him for our podcast, The Crazy Ones. So far in talking to him he sounds like a really nice, genuine guy.

https://twitter.com/TrevMcKendrick/status/400348753670197248

This is the first I'm hearing about it, and I'm looking forward to it too. Trevor's blog is great.

For me it's the opposite. Any time I'm set adrift, I feel trapped. Counter-intuitive, perhaps, but to me I feel like Jack of the Lantern, trapped in purgatory.

Sorry, but that's stupid. You have to be able to lose (http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=56 - chapter 19).

1) I think it's ok to say that someone did something stupid.

2) I think the error he made (not being able to lose) is an important error to be avoided. That's why I posted the comment.

Also, "wrong" is not necessarily the same as "stupid", and "disagrees with Eliezer Yudkowsky" is not the same as "wrong".

I agree that wrong isn't the same as stupid, but in this case I meant to say stupid.

I thought it would be apparent that it was a stupid decision but maybe I should have justified it.

One way to look at it is that rules (like "parents don't depend on their children") are just guidelines used to achieve desirable outcomes. In choosing how you act, you should aim to achieve the outcome, not to follow the rule. It seems that in his "not depending on his children", he acted to follow the rule, instead of to achieve the outcome.

http://hpmor.com/chapter/19

edit: It might also have gone over better if you had said "irrational" rather than "stupid", or perhaps "foolish". You were (if I understand right) saying that if he was unwilling to call on family for help, he was unwilling to lose face, unwilling to lose.

I believe differently. I'm sure part of it was hubris, and the shame of being homeless must sting, but I saw it more as trying to save face for his children. THEY knew he was homeless, but whenever he visited them near school of friends, he dressed in business dress so as to disguise his situation from THEIR friends. That sounded more like someone that was trying to ensure his kids have a smooth trajectory despite his own mistakes.

That said, you may still be right: it's possible that he never _asked_ for the favor of staying with a child's friend's family. (His kids were in school, I gathered, rather than adults -- did I miss that?) Had he done so, finding a job might have been easier ... though I am pessimistic enough to wonder how much, given the trouble he had once people saw the "gap" in his employment.

My point is only that IF he was doing it to save face for himself, that it's a stupid decision. His pride is less important than his well being (in terms of his happiness, his chances of bouncing back, his family and friends' happiness etc.).

Regarding my use of the word "stupid", I stand by it. I don't mean to be contentious at all. And I don't mean that he is a stupid person. I just mean that that decision is a stupid one (IF he in fact made it).

As far as stupid vs. foolish vs. irrational goes, I don't understand the meanings and connotations of these words well enough to really say, but I get the sense that 'stupid' does a better job of "calling someone out" and emphasizing the fact that a bad decision was made. I think these tasks needed to be accomplished, and so I think 'stupid' was the right word.

Hmm. That sounds awfully familiar.

Is it really that easy?

I'm currently 23, and if/when I ever get married, regardless of who brings in the income (both of us, just me, or just her), I would support whoever I married even if they lost their job or had some other hardship. You hear about people getting cancer or some other sickness and their spouse leaving them because they don't want to deal with it. It boggles my mind that these things occur.

If you weren't going to truly commit to the person, why would you get married? Just live together instead. Or get married without saying the vows if you just want the government benefits. I don't understand.

It's not just limited to spouses. It sounds like some of his children could have supported him as well. If something happened to my father, I would do everything I could to take care of him, regardless of what it cost me.

I'm curious of other HNers take on this. Has anyone been in a situation like this?

I don't know. I do know that marriages break up for many reasons, not all of them obvious to outsiders (or even one or both insiders). Do you think that the wife, who had spent the last n years raising eight children, had any skills that would get her a job bringing in enough money to keep both of them going?

The primary problem is he had too much hope. If he knew it was going to come to this, cashing in the chips earlier and moving out of the house ASAP would have been much better off financially than letting the house drain his net worth to zero at which point it couldn't drain any more.

Part of that hope is he still saw (still sees?) himself as a wealthy comedy writer and he might get hired as a local... but not if he's living in Germany as a house-husband. So to move away he'd have to give up hope, which he apparently refused to do. Ever.

Now the wife's "skill" was in having German citizenship. So she comes from a more civilized country where she doesn't have to sleep in a '97 minivan and can occasionally eat. So she pretty much has to go there and take the smallest of the kids with her. As an economic refugee or whatever. I've occasionally considered if I absolutely had to (like, ultimate worst case scenario) I'd become an economic refugee and move to a more civilized country, like Canada. I actually have enough "points" to immigrate legally, for that matter. Depressing as this sounds (because it is depressing...) as my elderly ancestors are dying off, I literally have fewer reasons every year to stay in the USA. So an upgrade is likely in my future.

You have to do what you have to do to keep the kids alive, and that means the wife is moving to Germany with the little kids, and he is staying in CA in the wild hope that he will get back in the biz. And long distance relationships being what they are...

You make it look like a profit-loss statement, in which its acceptable to walk out of a deal if its not profitable.

If that's the standard in a relationship, do you know the most dangerous part? Marriage doesn't make any sense for any man from that perspective. Marriage helps women more than it helps men. The man works all his life, like this guy worked 17 hr/day every day. Only to find when things get a little low, the wife will go to another man.

He might as well not get married, keep the money from his work for himself.

1. Marriages fail. Over, as the epigram says "Nothing of importance:/Nothing but money, sex, and self-importance."

2. The writer judged that he could not keep a roof over his family's head; he moved to his van, his wife in with a couple of their daughters. In my view, her primary responsibility at that point was to the well-being of the children, and she seems to have made a sensible decision. Do you know that the older daughters could have accommodated two sisters, a mother and a father? If not, on what grounds do you blame her? I really don't see what profitable deals have to do with this.

3. 17 hr/day. Yes, in the job he dreamed of, writing for a sitcom. I've worked with people working 17 to 17 hours a day, half of it cleaning motels and the other half not much more entertaining or glamorous. The two cases do not seem comparable.

4. "A little low ... another man". They had no house, and the wife was long separated when she met someone else, back in Germany.

During that time, I never considered it leaving my wife, as my life insurance policy covered suicide and would've left my wife financially secure forever ($1MM+).

I hope you never have to experience such despair, but having been there, I can see how people decide to split even if married. When things are at their darkest, nothing is off the table.

$10M on the other hand provides solidly middle-class income even in years of terrible market performance.

Also, getting a $10MM policy is a lot more difficult than a $1MM policy.

Edit: You were 30 and you owned your home free-and-clear? Good show!

It'd be interested to read the book and see just how 'casual' the wife's departure was--I'm guessing after 8 kids it wasn't.

Or perhaps both, as in moral fibre is an illusion brought on by lack of experience (i.e., is largely due to the fundamental attribution error)?

False dichotomy.

That's a pretty simple summary. You don't go from prosperous to poor without a lot of stress and frustration, and that can change people, usually for the worse. If your partner used to be very loving, and spend time with you, and now is working all the time, and angry at the world in general, and lashes out at you for not doing something trivial, and you fight all the time... at some point you just move on.

"I don't care if we live in a tent if I'm with you."

I recounted that line to her when I proposed years later.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/417319-we-all-make-vows-jimm...

It's longer, but here's one part. The speaker is explaining being married 4 times to 4 different men (each named George--the "same" person).

"Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people. . . . Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever."

After over 20 years of marriage, I have found that every few years I realize that I'm married to a different person than I was. So is she. Some changes are for the better, some for the worse. In both of us. But I know that if I could talk to myself on my wedding day and honestly describe to that young man what his future would hold, he'd have never believed it possible.

Here are some tips for you. If you get married, planning on remaining the same people, you're setting yourself up for your divorce after the discrepancy between who you are and who you pretend to be gets too large. If you get married, planning on holding to an ideal of marriage that you see written for someone in a book, well, there is a reason that evangelical Christians have a significantly higher divorce rate than atheists. If you get married and depend on belonging to a community/belief system that makes divorce not an option, you will create a hell for yourself on Earth - as several ex-Catholics of my acquaintance would be happy to testify. (I know plenty of current Catholics who would privately agree.)

The only way that I know of to be married a long time, and be happy, is if you both work on growing together, and changing in the same direction. You have to take the possibility of failure seriously to even have a chance of success. And even so, it is only a chance. You don't always grow together. Some changes simply can't be reconciled. You think this impossible? Here is a random example. I know multiple people whose spouses realized that they were gay after marriages lasting over a decade. You tell me how a marriage can survive that. I can't, because the ones I know about didn't.

You probably think that I am saying something horribly hateful. That's fair. I remember being outraged after 5 years of marriage when my older sister commented, "You're still in the easy part." But she was right, and I was wrong. I was, I just didn't know it.

Seriously, unless you've been married more than 10 years, I don't think that you can possibly have enough experience to base an opinion of your own on. If you make it to 20 years, I dare you to tell me that I am wrong. If you can accept my dare at that point with a straight face, I would be willing to bet money that you are living in denial. (I've watched people go through that as well. It is not a nice thing to watch the illusions that someone's life is based on crumble...)

Why is this? It is because ten years together is not simply one year repeated ten times. It is ten times the accumulated differences, experienced for ten times as long. That's 100 times as hard.

My parents were happily married for 17 years before my mother passed away from cancer. They had an essentially perfect, idealistic marriage. They never argued, they retained their same values/morals from the day they were married, and they were truly each other's best friend. I could tell both of them enjoyed each other's company immensely and unwaveringly. Maybe their personalities changed a little over time, but all of their important core values remained constant.

Is this a common occurrence? Not at all. I'm sure we can both agree on that. But from my perspective, as someone who grew up witnessing this kind of marriage, the fact that I know such a thing is possible means I would try hard to replicate it for my own family.

I say this because I know for a fact that my 9 year old son's view of my marriage and my view of the same thing are virtually unrelated. He sees, but he cannot understand. Nor does he have any idea what changes came before he was 5.

Here is perspective. My aunt and uncle were married nearly 60 years. They had one of the best marriages that I am aware of. Most of their children were unable to recognize the constant work in the face of ongoing changes that caused that until after they were married adults themselves.

Do you really know your parents' marriage as well as you think?

Without more information, it is impossible to tell.

However my opinion remains to trust the many experiences that I have had, and the experiences of people that I have known well. Your parents' story is not what most should expect to have happen.

My father always tells I will be able to understand my mom far better than he did. And my sister will be able to understand him far better than my mom did.

This happens for one simple reason. Kids think their parents marriage is perfect, because they are born into that assumption as that is all they see.

Not everyone grew up in a Hallmark special. There are plenty of kids in this world with a more realistic outlook of the world than you're allowing them.

That said, you seem to think that people getting married are rational and completely committed to their marital agreements. Unfaithful spouse statistics and divorce statistics tell a much different story.

When you get married, you aren't signing up to be a caretaker to a mentally unstable spouse. If your spouse is harming your children, it's your responsibility to get your children out of that situation however possible. There are thousands of legitimate situations that you'd agree are worthy of divorce.

There's a lot not said in this article. It's completely possible that he and his wife weren't well suited for each other to begin with. Roseanne was on the air for nine seasons. That's a lot of time to build resentment and hatred, if that's what was happening. Maybe the two years where he stayed at home let them figure out just how much they didn't care for each other. There are lots of legit possibilities.

It's not as simple as not living up to your commitment.

Yeah, mostly it really is. I'd make an exception if there is abuse or cheating going on, but yes when you get married you are signing up to be a caretaker to a sick, unstable, dying, unemployed, depressed, failing, whatever spouse. That's the deal. If you aren't prepared for that, don't get married.

Have you been married to a mentally ill person? Probably not. Why so quick to judge? (And why the arbitrary exception for abuse or cheating?)