In Search for Wealth Irrelevance
&gt; I went to the library and did a small experiment; what could I do if I were to start with nearly nothing? Ignoring my library card sitting in my pocket, I went up to the librarian and asked for access to the public computer. She handed me an access code to use, and I sat at one of the workstations and logged in. Using the default browser, I now had access to free resources like FreeCodeCamp or Open Source Society University to learn anything I needed. I could make an email account for free and use that to make accounts elsewhere. You can&#x27;t install anything on a public computer, but sites like Replit provide an online IDE to create almost anything. You can make a GitHub account to manage your code, contribute to others, even host projects thanks to GitHub Pages. You can make a free Heroku account and have a backend server to build on. Everything needed for success, although not perfect, was there. Nothing stops you from trying to start a small business, applying for software jobs, or making silly games as long as you&#x27;re determined to make the most of what you have rather than feeling paralyzed at what you don&#x27;t.<p>This seems to be the functional crux of the argument, but it&#x27;s flawed, for at least a couple reasons.<p>(1) It presupposes a background in CS and software engineering, as well as knowledge of the ecosystem of tools available online. At some point in your life, you have to have had the time and stability in life to learn all that, and you need time and stability to work towards your goals in the present using those tools.<p>(2) It&#x27;s too narrow in scope. This is shown as one example of a general philosophical mindset, but in fact software engineering is uniquely suited to starting out from nothing in this way. You&#x27;d be hard-pressed to find analogous examples that require any interaction with the physical environment.<p>If you&#x27;re already into software, and you want to learn more about it or build something new, you&#x27;re right that we have a lot of free resources available online to do so. And I agree that it&#x27;s good to structure your life, when you can, so that pursuit of wealth isn&#x27;t important, and you just happen to do so along the way. But I think it&#x27;s difficult to translate that into a more general point about simply adopting a different outlook on your circumstances to effect meaningful change. There are big swaths of the human experience that that philosophy doesn&#x27;t speak to.