If you have your own business, and a reasonably broad customer base, you can say “fuck you” (metaphorically speaking) to just about anyone.
NO! Having owned my own business, the whole “become self employed and be your own boss” is a complete falsehood. If you want to survive in business, you have to treat every real customer as you boss. You exchange one boss for hundreds. And the result is the same- piss your “boss” (customers) off and you get “fired” (go out of business.)
This is why you get so many failed small businesses and also so many disgruntled sellers on eBay.
*Every customer is your boss- be prepared to kiss even more ass.
*
The difference is that if you get fired by 5-10% of your customers, you don’t lose your job. So each customer doesn’t have the kind of power over you that your boss does at work. So if you have a broad customer base, you can say “fuck you” to the worst ones.
Probably.
No.
I’ve seen this in practice. I once worked in a hotel, and to call my boss a bitch would be generous. She was over-the-top *nasty *to about 10% of the customers (which she seems to have picked at random for her verbal cruelty and pranks). She was also the kind who would respond to “I’m never staying here again!” with “Good! And, please, tell all of your little friends so they won’t come either.” In the few years I worked there, I know she had to righetously piss off at least a hundred people, but we never suffered for business.
Yes. Human beings are social beings. Any individual spends most of his or her mental effort thinking about other human beings: communicating with them; planning how to communicate with them; judging them; worrying about their judgements; criticizing their behavior; evaluating art, politics, business, and other topics that are merely agglomerations of human thought. No person spends much time thinking exclusively about themself, or about non-human topics like wood and rocks. For example, every minute that you spend on this message board, you’re spending contemplating the material written by other members of this message board. If you’re reading a book, your thoughts are about the author’s message. If you’re watching TV, your thoughts are about the decisions made by the writers and producers etc… But even when the books are shut, the newspaper is in the trash, the TV and computer are off and you’re lying in bed without any direct input from such sources, you still devote most of your mental effort to thinking about other people.
Consequently, one’s happiness tracks one’s feelings about others. Hate everyone else and you’ll spend 90% of your time thinking about stuff you hate. Love everyone else and you’ll spend 90% of your time thinking about stuff you love. That’s the theory, and in my (amittedly short) life I’ve never seen it violated in practice.
In any encounter between two people, happiness is maximized if the two people are friendly, communicative, and pleasant, the encounter will end with both happier than at the beginning. If they’re rude, then it ends with both unhappier. Consequently, it’s always best to work for basic politeness in all cases, rather than saying “the goal is to be rude”. (Even if that’s not the goal in one hundred percent of the cases.)
The fundamental fact is that nasty encounters stick in our mind much more than nice encounters. If you and your neighbor exchange a few pleasant words on the way out the door, you’ll forget about it before you reach the end of the driveway. If, on the other hand, the two of you have a fight, you’ll spend the whole day brooding on it and make yourself miserable as a result. Consequently, better not to have the fight in the first place.
Yup. If I may invoke a metaphor, it’s like you started a thread to calculate how many shovels one would need to dig down to the top of the Sears Tower, and I’m politely pointing out that you’re facing in the wrong direction.
I doubt that there are many people like this in the world. However, wanting to tell everyone to “fuck off” is different from wanting to have the option of saying “fuck off.”
What if you spend 90% of your time singing “Kumbaya” around campfires?
Anyhoo, if “fuck you money” is too raw a term, “financial independence” may serve. They pretty much mean the same thing.
But that’s not what we’re supposing. It’s more abstract than telling someone to “fuck off”. We’re talking about the ability to say “fuck off” whatever entity requires us to do things we don’t like in order to put food on our table. Mastering your own fate does not necessarily require telling everyone to fuck off; only those people who seek to use your needs to control you.
That’s not necessarily true. If you’re sole proprietor, you have the ability to decide when a customer’s request is unreasonable, and you can refuse it without being forced to quit the business.
On the other hand, if you work for somebody else, you have no power to refuse if a customer asks for something stupid. And if the person making that decision isn’t the one who has to do the work, all the more likely you’ll end up doing it.
Owning your own business isn’t a silver bullet for life’s problems or financial independence. It’s just a different approach to making a livelihood that holds an appeal for some people.
ITR: It’s not so much a “Fuck you” as a “Fuck your demands”, I think. Or, rather a “fuck you” to dependance than to real people. You don’t have to hate people to want to be independent of them. I love my friends, but I also love the fact that being with them is a possibility rather than a necessity for my happiness.
I agree with you in saying it’s [normally] for your own good to be nice to others, but your example with the neighbour is way off. A fight is a far more significant event than a simple “good morning”, and nostalghia suggests we remember good events better than equally significant bad ones.
But seriously, the rest of you has high standards. You should drink some more tea and take a walk in the forest.
No.
There are people who have T-shirts or bumper stickers saying “fuck you”, or some variant thereof, which is basically the same as saying it out loud to everybody.
I’ve never met anyone who does so, but if such a person exists, I imagine that they’re among the happiest, ahem, campers on the planet.
In his original post, Scylla talks about “fuck you money” as retirement money; in other words, it’s the amount a person needs in order to maintain their lifestyle without having to do any actual work, beyond the small amount of effort needed to manage your portfolio. Financial independence means that you’re maintaining the desired lifestyle by your own work and not leaning on your parents, the welfare system, etc… Financial independence usually means having a job, not avoiding a job.
But the bigger point here is priorities, not semantics. Life is supposed to be about enjoying life, not about finding reasons to not enjoy life. So when Scylla defines his life’s goal around the ability to say “fuck you”, he’s got it wrong. Wrong if he wants to say “fuck you” to everyone, and also wrong if he only wants to say it to certain people. Because having the attitude that being able to piss people off is a good thing is an attitude that works against one’s own happiness. Now if he had started by asking how much one needs for retirement money, I probably wouldn’t have posted anything in this thread. I was trying to make a light-hearted comment on the assumptions behind how he phrased the question. His way was wrong for several reasons, and doesn’t lead to a clear answer. A fundamentalist Christian who thinks that all profanity users get sent to hell can’t say “fuck you” in any circumstance, even if he’s richer than Bill Gates and there’s nobody nearby to hear. A sullen teenage boy can (and will) say “fuck you” in every circumstance, even if the result is quite negative for himself.
That’s correct. I have my own business and I’ve fired many customers.
That’s true too. Working for somebody else is like having a business with only 1 customer. If that one customer decides to start pulling your strings, you’re hosed.
That’s also true. I work very hard and struggle financially. But I have a ton of “fuck you” power, which is nice.
I don’t speak for Scylla, but I understand “fuck you” as a dramatic way of describing the act of terminating a relationship. When I quit my job, I didn’t literally say “fuck you” to anyone; I simply sent a memo to my department head saying that I was resigning my position. However, I believe that would qualify as a “fuck you” per the OP.
You’re still reading it wrong. If the thread title had referring to “no, thank you” money (i.e. you’re sufficiently secure that you can respond to any offer that you don’t like with a polite but firm “no, thank you”) would that make a difference? It’s not that someone who in financially independent can casually antagonize others (and incur bad karma, ooooooh), it’s that they can afford to pick and choose who to do business with, and generally who to associate with.
Or is that mere “semantics”?
BryanWonderful approach.
It should also be noted, I guess that “Not having to work” isn’t the same as “Having to not work”. FYM isn’t about being irresponsible, but not having to be responsible. Financially.
Gotta love the nuances of this, haha
Sure you do. You can say you’d rather not to your boss. Or walk off. Or…
But yes, you make a good 2nd point.
Well geez, if you put it that way…
Saying “fuck you” is not the same as saying “no, thank you”. The one is as antagonistic as possible, the other as polite as possible. To hold them synonymous is to deny the existence of the concept of politeness.
The term “Fuck you money” is a whimsical colloquialism. It’s financial independance, and not having to be beholden or dependant on anybody else for your financial well-being.
It’s not to be taken literally as if the goal is to walk around telling people to “fuck off.”
Sheesh.