Face it: you're a crazy person

Reality of Small Business and Coffee Shops

• Many commenters relate to daydreaming about opening a café while knowing they’d hate the day-to-day reality: loans, thin margins, supplier risk, staff problems, unruly customers, and constant small emergencies.
• Several stress that small businesses often mean “buying yourself a job” with worse hours and more stress than employment, plus personally guaranteed debt that may exceed resale value.
• Competition is about more than price: location, vibe, service, and quality often matter more than undercutting chains, but you must genuinely enjoy solving those specific problems.
• Some argue the key test is whether you find questions like bean sourcing, equipment choice, and dealing with freeloaders or homeless patrons interesting, not whether you know the answers upfront.

Obsession, “Craziness,” and Creative Careers

• Commenters highlight that top performers (novelists, musicians, founders) often have a near-manic drive: they’d keep doing the work even without success.
• Others note many great writers and thinkers kept day jobs; obsession can coexist with non-glamorous primary work.
• There’s debate over advice like “only do X if you’ll go crazy if you don’t”: some see it as realistic for professional creators, others as gatekeeping that discourages amateurs.

Internet Content and Abuse

• Several say the hardest part of online creation is not consistency but enduring waves of hostile comments, including encouragements to self-harm.
• Some advocate “never read the comments”; others argue you must learn to cultivate an audience, filter abuse, and still absorb useful feedback.
• There’s disagreement on how much thick skin is personality-driven versus trainable.

Academia and Teaching

• The professor anecdote resonates: many students want the status fantasy, not the actual work of writing papers, grading, and advising.
• Some love office hours and one-on-one debugging of student misunderstandings but dislike lecturing, status rituals, or grant-chasing.
• Others argue the article slightly caricatures academic careers; many grad students already know about publish-or-perish.

Software Engineering: Passion, Money, and AI

• Strong divide between people who truly love programming (tinker as kids, would code anyway) and those attracted mostly by pay.
• Several blame the “easy money” reputation of tech for an influx of unhappy, shortcut-seeking engineers.
• Views on AI split: some enthusiasts see it as removing drudgery; others worry it erodes the very activity they enjoy.

Meaning, Morality, and Work

• A recurring theme is that beyond enjoyment and pay, many want work that feels morally meaningful or tangibly improves lives (e.g., cafes as community spaces).
• Others emphasize that many people cannot “choose” in this way; financial constraints force them into jobs they never unpacked and may not like.

Unpacking vs. Overthinking

• Supporters see “unpacking” as a powerful reality check: examining day-to-day tasks reveals whether you actually like the process, not just the identity.
• Critics warn that fully unpacking can create analysis paralysis or scare people away from paths they’d grow to like; many careers are stumbled into and only later appreciated.
• A compromise view: unpack enough to detect obvious mismatches, but accept that every path has tedium and unknowns, and some experimentation is unavoidable.

Map vs. Territory and Abstraction

• Brief side thread distinguishes Borges’ “map the size of the territory” from “the map is not the territory”: one is about over-precise models, the other about the inherent gap between representation and reality, used here to justify useful simplifications versus naive fantasies about careers.