The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
"Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?"
I agree. Why shouldn't you? I've never heard anyone say "I wish I'd put more time and effort into work". I -have- heard "I wish I was paid more", and if effort equates to that (from all observations of my career, I remain unconvinced) I can see that changing your minimum (i.e., from "minimum required to not get fired" to "minimum required to get to the next level"), but going above and beyond that minimum doesn't extrinsically affect you. So if intrinsically you value 'life' more than 'work' there...better to take that time/effort and put it into life.
This article just made it clear how ephemeral work meaning is, and how important life meaning is, and how important it is to subjugate the former to the latter. Which I agree, seems at odds with the title.
I don't know if it really feels incomplete, instead the article seems to make a more compelling case for the opposite of the headline actually being true.
If we assume the following premise from the article is true...
> The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame.
The article makes a much more compelling case that the life side is worth quite a lot, and the work side isn't worth much... Meaning work/life balance should be easy.
I can't make sense of this article. Did the dad stop working as much? Keep on working as much? Work more? The intro makes it seem like he learned to work less, but then the rest makes it seem like he didn't.
Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
Indeed. If we assume "work" is doing something you wouldn't otherwise do, then absolutely, you should be asking that question. And for most people, that's likely true of almost any employment.
Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community.
"Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
It’s not even pure productivity, much of it is just wasted time.
Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
Advocating for a 4 day workweek (or rather, the ongoing ratcheting down of the workweek) gets us to what you describe: flushing out the busy bodies and preventing the savagery of work theater. If work fills the time you allocate for it (Parkinson’s Law [1]), there is no governor on useless tasks or meetings, and countless hours of person life are needlessly wasted.
Aren't you contradicting yourself? Work has to do with family/community if you use your salary to support your family/community.
Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.
I wonder how these companies we all work for manage to pay our salaries by selling anything if nothing we build contributes to the needs of peoples families.
After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?
But say that we didn't have business or currency, and you had to go and get food for your family. Wouldn't you have to make sacrifices even then? There might be an emotional situation going on at home, but if the food supply was dwindling that is also an immediate problem.
If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.
> If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food.
That is untrue. There is ample evidence that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than industrialized societies. Just to name two sources I've recently read: Harari covers it in Sapiens, and before that Mumford covered it in Technics and Human Development.
Realistically, if I wanted a similar family quality of life as hunter-gatherer societies, I could reach it in far less work time in modern society. Cutting out the expenses of larger/modern housing, advanced healthcare, higher education, and a lot of expensive leisure activities, living a simple family life would be very cheap and affordable on less than a 40 hour work week. I could even have a better lifestyle in many regards for the same amount of work time.
Yeah I think the problem here is that modern "work" is too separated from survival.
This seems to be why a lot people feel much more fulfilled when then venture out into nature for a decent amount of time. The things they do there directly impact their survival. I agree that people do need work in that sense.
Some people aren't family oriented. They find more meaning in work and, despite the all of the attempts to devalue work in the blog and this response, it's ok. We don't have to judge people who make that choice because we prefer another.
i made some other replies that would imply otherwise but you do make a fair point. I think it's not fair to ask your partner/children to pay your ticket if you want to put work first however. If that's who you are (and that's perfectly acceptable) then don't have a family and ask them to foot your bill emotionally.
Our society needs people to haul garbage away. I would bet many of them don’t do it because it’s rewarding. It just gives them money to pay for things they care about. Should all those people leave hauling our garbage?
Hauling away garbage is a thankless but virtuous task that benefits society. I would bet that a fair number of workers in that space actually do find satisfaction in it. Likewise, my usual UPS delivery driver seems to take pride in his work and I've noticed and appreciate it. The longer I work in tech, the more I get the itch to quit and work as a handyman or something for a few years.
you will be amazed at the satisfaction you get from doing something to better the world a tiny bit and help your fellow man. and how much skill and creativity some of those other people express every day.
There are actually people who have retired from their IT jobs to drive garbage trucks. If the garbage hauling job doesn't itch a scratch that you have, then find something else or raise the pay until someone is happy to haul your trash.
Sounds like there are hierarchies in the garbagemen business. I recall reading an article a few years back about garbagemen, the ones who ride on the back of the trucks, they do back-breaking work, and it's definitely a young man's gig.
I've admittedly never seen our garbage trucks in operation here in my Dallas suburb, but for over a decade in Louisiana, our garbage trucks were a 1 man crew who ran a robotic arm.
When I worked retail, I met a lot of people who I would bet didn't find the work rewarding at all. They were there to get the paycheck. Most of them did as well as they did because they felt it was the right thing to do, but some only did well enough to not lose their job.
The older I get, the more I understand those people who only did enough to keep their job. I used to feel it was an ethical obligation to do my best, but I'm realizing that that is a one-sided view. The opposite argument was always "they don't treat me as well as they can" or something like that, and so they excused their own behavior... And I get it now.
I have no doubt that there are many garbage collectors who find their job rewarding... But I've also no doubt that there are many who just do it for the money, and would be just as happy (or more so) if their needs were met by society and they could concentrate on something they enjoyed instead.
FWIW, I think it's important that people do things that they feel contribute to society. But that doesn't have to be "work".
This is spoken from a clear position of entitlement. Many lives do not have the benefit of being fulfilling or rewarding, and those same lives do not have a choice to "do something else."
This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy.
But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs.
It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.
The problem is basically sow/harvest. If you're in the situation most people are in, you need to eat today, and you need to eat tomorrow.
Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future.
However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old.
It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.
Life is what happens when you're making other plans.
People are always spending today planning for tomorrow. Tomorrow then becomes today and the process repeats. People often forget you live your life today.
This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
Jon Jandai did a TED talk about this, he was from rual Thailand, he tried to get qualifications and a big city job and then couldn't. He describes his life after returning to his village as spending a few weeks planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house with no downpayment or mortgage, and having most months of the year free, doing a lot of reading, and teaching people about saving seeds, farming, house building, community building, in exchange for hand-me-down clothes and so on.
He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html
Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited.
It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored.
If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.
{Insert HN comment guideline about avoiding simplistic dismissals here}.
> "Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited."
Not "of course"; it's typically said or implied that even prime-age healthy males would have to work like abused pack horses and still barely survive. A limited data point it is, but there is another - his same scheme includes elderly women building their own homes, and young schoolchildren building their own school. Turning mud into bricks and bricks into a single story one or two room building, working together with no deadlines, doesn't need the labours of Hercules. The datapoint is not just "it's possible to be a subsistence farmer" which we did know, but "we always talk of subsistence farming as gruelling long hard work which leads to things like Russian peasants eating cabbage soup then starving to death in winter; here is a real live example of a community subsistence farming and surviving with at least an order of magnitude less work than commonly assumed, maybe more".
> "That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored."
He couldn't, he doesn't have the money or any marketable skills, he never did become a wealthy employee who choose to give it up for a rural life; from that page I linked "I worked hard but had no savings, just enough to make me survive day by day. I was disappointed with my life in the city. I couldn’t compete with anyone. I felt I had failed".
> "If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result."
Interesting that you've gone from "he could fly back to the city any time he wanted" as a dismissal to "he'd have nowhere to go if he needed city resources" as a dismissal in such a short time. But yes, no doubt those things could happen, he does say "learned to do many kinds of self-healing" and no doubt that does not include making antibiotics, anaesthesia, surgeons, dental fillings or living to 95 on a cocktail of statins and beta blockers and blood pressure pills and anticoagulants and antidepressents and metformin and all the rest.
The big question is not "how romantic is it" but whether "I do not feel bad about myself anymore", "When I started to do more things by myself, I have more confidence and less fear", "now I enjoy spending my life with my family and friends and plants" are worth the price compared to having readily available opticians and doctors while feeling like an isolated unhappy failure endlessly losing a forever-competition in city jobs while building no community.
Yeah if he knew even one person back in America, he could arrange to return.
Heck, just because he's American he has in his head the idea that he could go anywhere. He went there after all; he could go back.
Pick at the verbiage all you like; an American playing at being a poor subsistence farmer is theatre. The guy gave a TED talk after all. Did he do that from his 3rd-world farm?
> planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house
These are all things that I can't do. On top of that, even if I could build a house from clay bricks that I made myself, I would be sleeping outside until the bricks and house were complete.
This doesn't sound like a very good counterpoint to me. I never said that working in a big city is the _only_ way to live. My point is only that the modern economy allows us to provide goods and services to other people and businesses, which in turn allows a small subset of workers to provide the necessary food and goods for survival of the entire society.
So, from that angle, working is not useless, it is just a proxy for what you would be doing if you had to provide food and shelter for yourself.
Some people find this idea of living off the land and growing your own food to be romantic. I don't, I enjoy modern society, and I feel like 40 hours a week is a ridiculously small investment to put in for what I get in return.
In the example you gave, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of current people would actually starve and die if they tried it. This TED talk speaker _grew up in rural Thailand_ and apparently had all of the tools to live this way. Most of us do not have that experience.
Survival is easy. I mean not easy-easy but I mean survival is a pretty low bar. There are ton of places on the planet that don't benefit from the 'modern economy'. Hell, there are places that are actually getting screwed over the by the 'modern economy' and there are war torn anarchy-ridden places (for real anarchy, not the Fox News take on Seattle) and people still survive, procreate, etc.. if you actually want to talk extremes. Granted they're not developing new mRNA vaccines or something.
This modern economy is the exact religion that preaches the same gospel in the blog post: Maslow's pyramid of needs dictates that you need to work. Which is.. fine, I guess? My problem with that is that the work has become super productive in the past decades and that excess production allows only a fraction of people to stop working. Coupled with replacing the benefits of an actual community with the downgrade which is a workplace to give you that sense of belonging, self-sufficiency propaganda and employer-only provided healthcare, you get a nation of wage slaves.
We don't really need to work. I mean not all of us. A lot of the work done nowadays is bullshit [1]. The pandemic kinda showed us exactly who needs to go work to keep society going. The rest is just the result of:
- inertial protestant ethic
- wealth hoarding by the owners of production
- people tied to their workplace are easier to persuade/manage/manipulate politically
You miss pretty much the entire point of the article, as well as the purpose of life in general.
Work is good for the worker. Because humans need a purpose in life. We don't even need to experiment to see what society would be like if no one worked and a few robots produced our food. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking this would be a utopia - no, it would be a worse dystopia than you could possibly imagine.
Take away people's purpose, and you will be left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people with lots of time on their hands. Pretty clear recipe for constant depression and war.
I'll read the book before I comment on it directly.
Work is work and jobs are jobs. You can work without a job and you can have a purpose in life without a 9 to 5. Homemakers don't work or have no purpose in life? You're talking about a different thing here.. I was referring to what people are required to do in order to survive, eat and have shelter in modern society, not have purpose and fulfillment. Does caring for sick relatives with no pay constitute work in your view? Or is that person a slacker and a burden on society? If your purpose in life is your shitty 9 to 5 job then you kinda failed at life. I'm pretty sure the person blowing the leaves of the sidewalk doesn't stay awake at night with an existential life crisis thinking that he missed a spot.
It's the exact same narrative I always have to defend against when talking about financial independence. This is not to say people will be idle and just sit around doing nothing. People still do 'things' whether or not the things they do make money or not.
> left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people
There's that disgusting protestant work ethic again. It's really baked into the fabric of our society.. It's not your fault. Read a book or two, open your mind, I guarantee you'll recover.
I’ll argue this in good faith. Let’s take your preconditions as fact for the purposes of this discussion - employers are either “wealthy sociopaths” or agents of the same.
You may find the options they offer to be unacceptable, but what if they didn’t exist? What options available to you if that were the case are not available to you because they do exist?
As far as I can see our current system is beneficial, if only because it allows people additional choices of how to live their lives.
Beneficial compared to what? We're stuck in a peak and there may be much higher ones elsewhere but because to traverse to those points we might have to descend the idea is unthinkable.
I'm inclined to agree. Maybe I would have phrased it differently, but the only counter to this I've seen here is "what if society didn't exist?"
It doesn't need to be taken to that extreme. I find it hard to believe that the idea that work must take up all of your time, and any less means you're going to starve is this pervasive.
It is not unimaginable that we can improve things. We're constantly making improvements to efficiency, productivity, sustainability. We get more done in our time now than at any point in history. The same will be true tomorrow.
Why then, are so many still working such grueling hours?
In this country, and many others, the share of productivity gains has increasingly gone to capital rather than labor. Although I think that this is only part of it. Part of it is cultural, this ideology that work gives life meaning, and to reject it can mean losing a lot.
I'm pretty lucky myself, my job doesn't stress me out, it pays the bills and leaves me with some disposable income. A lot of people would describe me as unambitious, not driven, etc. I'd say I have it made.
I personally found a lot from Lucretius Carus's "De Rerum Natura"[0]. It was important to popularize the philosophy of Epicurus. It describes three types of needs:
1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing.
2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc.
3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc.
If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain.
Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important.
His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance.
I'm not sure that it _should_ be hard, but I am sure that it always will be hard. This is just the nature of life, your attention is zero-sum. More time here means less time there.
Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money.
So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.
Your work should revolve around your life, not your life around your work. There's always going to be another exciting project after this one. There's not going to be another exciting life after this one.
This might be true in this case since the father was a Silicon Valley engineer. Stepping back, however, and I hate to be that guy, but your statement is "dripping with privilege", as the kids say nowadays. I can tell you that my parents would have not been able to say that, as they worked in manual labor jobs which damaged their bodies in order to provide me with the opportunity to study instead of work.
As a second point, reincarnation is a common religious concept, and there could very well be another exciting life after this one (although you probably shouldn't peg any plans on that).
You're right, that was coming from the statement that the father was a SV engineer.
My parents didn't have any exciting projects either, in fact, children's lives depend on my mother who is a pediatric cardiologist in 3rd world country. Nevertheless, she came back from work and read the book with me before bed. I couldn't ask for more.
But when people pull long shifts to get the next version of the browser that makes marginal improvements instead of spending time with friends/family/doing a hobby (essentially living, not working) and take it as a medal of honor, they are missing a lot in life. People working late hours to put the food on the table and people deliberately working late and then using it as an excuse are different. If they're the latter, please don't tell that they're having hard time balancing work/life.
well privileged or not death is inevitable. From the person panhandling on the street to the Elon Musks of the word, you have about 75-80 years on average then lights out. I think you can consider and contemplate that no matter your privilege.
Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before.
The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
This is a function of specialization. You fill out TPS reports to generate value for a company which allows you to purchase food created by people who specialize in food generation.
Not all work involves filling out TPS reports. A lot of workplaces have completely automated this aspect. And you should feel free to quit jobs that haven't for jobs that have; by doing so, you're making the economy more efficient.
Honestly asking, how is it not a survival skill? It's a high level abstraction that's part of the "need" for the company, which is why they're paid to fill out that report, with the skill being all the intelligent/understanding required for that high level abstraction. It's literally paying for all the needs and squishy comforts of life for that individual, most likely much squishier than an average individual.
That's why I said proxy. The vast minority of members of our society take care of our actual physical needs. The rest of us do other things to provide other kinds of value, so that the farmers can do things like enjoy a nice TV show at the end of their day without producing it themselves.
For some of those other companies, a TPS report is required.
Everyone agrees that people need to do certain things to survive. What complicates this line of thinking are the social facts that are assumed when we conceptualize work. The way that work is conceptualized is culturally specific across space and time. The construction "eating implies survival implies work" doesn't imply that our culturally specific conceptualization of work is implied. There are many interesting ways to have conversations about work means, how it changes, and what factors influence how people think about what work is and isn't.
I buy this. Maybe this is what people mean when they are anti work - they're just anti modern work?
I think it's good to be critical, we can always improve the system. But I also personally believe our society is actually incredible at self-optimizing, and we are pretty darn close to an ideal system in practice. It's easy to focus on the bad, but our society has produced truly immeasurable good (very little relative violence, hunger, boredom, etc.) Of course it can be improved, and there are some real problems, particularly around wealth inequality. But I can't help but think that we're doing pretty damn good.
> I buy this. Maybe this is what people mean when they are anti work - they're just anti modern work?
It's not "modern work" but work-the-social-institution. Which is the primary definition of "work."
What they don't mean is productive activity. Every productive activity that takes place within the social institution of work also takes place outside of that social institution. For example, farming, building construction, cooking, cleaning, education -- all of these take place both inside and outside of work.
Technology has allowed the rise of "made-up", survivally unnecessary jobs like Metaverse programmer, pop singer, and marketing specialists. If anything, the pandemic proved we don't need restaurants and tourism to survive.
Art, entertainment, and communication are not new human creations. These jobs are the result of psychological needs that humans have. Maslow's Hierarchy is more than a cave, nuts, and berries.
Furthermore, not everyone can survive without specialization of labor. Prior to specialization of labor, it was much more common for people to die young, and the world's population reflected this.
Specialisation of what labor? We've always had hunters and gatherers, and still do. We've always been specialised.
What I'm saying is Maslow's scale is tipped upside down with an overabundance of leisure and scarcity of high quality basic fulfillment. There's so much entertainment, that we can afford for a few markets to crash and disappear, hence why I called them "made-up".
We have tons of high quality basic fulfillment. Food is higher quality, more abundant, and cheaper than it ever has been. Educational attainment is the highest it has ever been. Global measures of violence are at historical lows. Specialized healthcare is more available than it ever has been.
I think you've got cause and effect reversed. It's our exceptional progress on basic fulfillment that has enabled our economy to support these so-called "made-up" jobs.
I don't necessarily agree. Food has always been "organic free range humaine grass fed unpesticized sun-shined unprocessed" - nowadays you'd go bankrupt buying everything from certified health stores. Education is aimed at an acceptable mean in large groups instead of pedagogues. Death and injury rates are down because of advances in medicine - people are inexplicably violent still (please read or listen to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman). European healthcare is great.
Work is not a proxy for survival. Sometimes have to take time off work to keep your baby alive. Taking care of the survival of your family isn't work. Changing diapers isn't work. Work is a social relation.
Work is much more than that - it enables you to feed your family. If there wasn’t a service economy and you had to grow or gather your own food, sometimes you would have to choose between changing a diaper and going to find more food.
That’s just what it takes to live, we forget that because of how far removed we are from actual survival. But take away modern society, and the world is much harsher and much less fulfilling.
> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true.
Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. I can spend two or three weeks idling most of the time, but after that I need something to direct my energy and concentration toward. I need a goal that stretches my abilities, or I find myself constantly battling a depressive spiral.
What people need is to be able to channel their energy into something productive, whether it be learning, hobbies, helping others in a meaningful way, or maybe some sort of self-improvement in terms of health.
I suppose you could put all of that under the vague umbrella of "work", but for the purpose of having a conversation that's not arguing about semantics, work is what most people do to generate an income to support their life goals and activities.
> Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
I've also gone through a few such periods, in between jobs. Best time of my life. Even though I didn't accomplish a whole lot during it that you could put on paper and call work. Learned a few things, improved friendships, and did a little room remodel.
That's not work, that's life. The opposite of working is not idling, it is spending your time in activities that realize your self without being constrained by the survival struggle.
I think his point (and the broader point being assumed by the author) was that "spending your time in activities that realize your self" does, in fact, feel a lot like work.
If your passion is painting, and its something you would do for free, then fulfilling your artistic potential is still work. It still requires hours upon hours of deliberate practice. The great masters would spend years working on a single painting. You don't think there would be times when they just didn't feel like making progress? Where they wanted to just take the day off and hang out at a bar with their friends?
Part of the human condition is struggle, imo. That's what I think the OP is getting at when he says that human beings need work. Maybe not a 9-5, but we all need something worth staving off instant gratification for.
Some people still consider tasks they enjoy doing a form of "work". Work doesn't have to be compensated activities engaged in out of a desperate need to provide basic necessities.
Just different people using the same word to mean different things.
> Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life.
Would your abilities feel stretched by being a cashier? How about a janitor? Waiter?
These jobs are what "work" actually is for most people. I think most people could go without doing those things.
Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work (and for most people those things and "work" are hardly related at all). Therefore, saying we (as humans) "need" work is generally incorrect (at least for the reasons you stated) since most people don't even get what you say we "need" from work anyway.
> Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work
Just different definitions of "work". I think the sense meant by those saying people "need work" is "meaningful toil". Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.
So cashier, janitor, waiter would fit that broad definition, even though they are not a focus of intellectual life. But there can be other types of work that also fulfill intellectual needs, that might be more fulfilling for many (most? all?) people.
I'm going to disagree on this simplification. There is a common definition of work, e.g. the definition used in the context of work/life balance (i.e. the context of the original article), that is widely used; redefining it to be as broad as you've described is detrimental to the conversation.
> Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.
Essentially everything can be made to fit this definition, making it, I think, not very useful.
Thank you for laying this out. Exploring these are the ideas I had in mind when exploring the work-survival substitution. If I may also point out, the conceptualization of work is self-reinforcing too. Jobs are defined from the assumption of the work-fact. This in turn transforms peoples' subjective experience of work into definitions of work as an objective reality.
>Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work
Your reply is entirely reasonable but it seems the gp already covered what you wrote and anticipated it in his disclaimer: ">It needn’t be employment,[...]"
He just happened to use the imprecise label "work" -- which is so tainted and overloaded that one can't re-use that word to also describe "non-employment intellectual activity" because it inadvertently tricks people into talking past each other.
(E.g. Notice that you used "work" as synonym for "employment" but the gp did not.)
You're right. This is clear had I actually noted that disclaimer, and was simply an oversight on my part.
With that in mind, I'll just agree with your analysis, redefining "work" to include "non-employment" is detrimental to the conversation. When people discuss work/life balance (i.e. in the original article), they are (almost universally) not talking about balancing intellectually stimulating hobbies and the rest of life. We are, from the onset, talking about jobs, i.e. employment.
Additionally, I think my original comment is still useful when discussing the more common definition of work.
I just went into the hardware store last week. The cashier at the store was talking to someone he knew. He actually took the job there because he had retired, and had nothing to do. So he works there for 20/hrs a week. So for him, he needed work.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all... but I do that kind of interesting. I like to think that if I had unlimited free time, there's no way I'd ever be bored, I have so many things that I love doing... No way I'd give up 20 hours of my week just to go work as a cashier when I don't need to.
That said... things might change when I get older.
First, as I said in my comment, the man in your example is likely not working in order to "stretch [his] abilities" as was the context of my comment...
Second, I'm not sure that doing something out of boredom is equivalent to a "need," regardless of how one might describe it.
Third, it seems to me that many people's only source of purpose is work (partially because they must work exhaustively to survive), so, when the need or ability to work is removed, they have nothing else; the idea that "work" is either a necessity or a noble pursuit in of itself only serves to reinforce this outlook and the resulting behavior (i.e. deriving all purpose from work).
I don't want to push too hard, but it should be somewhat self-evident who might benefit from a culture that perpetuates a myth of work as necessity.
Or: having a public-facing job is something to do that also served as a social outlet for him (especially if it's related to his hobbies) that was free (how many social activities (the kind where you meet people, not the kind where you spend time with folks you already know) are free these days?).
Every time I go to a nursery I think about how much fun it would be to "work" there, if I didn't have to consider the pay, because I love plants and talking about plants and making chit-chat with strangers.
> Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
Sure but that is taking a short break from your job/career. Its not like leaving school and never working.
> Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it.
"It is difficult for a man who always has a full stomach to put his mind to some use. Are there not players of liubo and go? Even playing these games is better than being idle." -- Confucious
> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true.
Nonsense.
Most men derive purpose in life from work (ie. providing) - this is basic psychology. Even male millionaires start new companies so they have something to do with their time.
Women have entered the workplace, but they're mostly driven by insecurity, not purpose. As one woman programmer told me, "You want to be world-class. I want to sit in my garden patio."
Also, give the fruity prose a break, this is HN, not Lapham's Quarterly.
I don't think that was the author's message at all.
Rather, I think that this post is about balance, and about being emotionally present. He's saying that it should be a constant struggle to balance off things that you care about, because that shows you care. The only way to avoid the struggle is to cease caring, and that means you push something out of your mind that you really should be paying attention to because it's uncomfortable.
I've got plenty of stories about a dad who went the other way - full time househusband, gave up his career entirely soon after my sister and I were born - but they're a bit too personal to share on HN. It's not all roses and sunshine on that side either, though.
>He's saying that it should be a constant struggle to balance off things that you care about, because that shows you care
Yay, survival should be a struggle, because it shows you care (about increasing the ROI for the shareholders you'll never see)!
"We need work" is justified by "we need shelter and food".
The only thing a constant struggle shows is that you don't have the freedom to choose how you spend your life.
What people need is a vocation, a calling, fulfilment from creativity or helping other people out. The things that we call hobbies, that is (and people who enjoy them - amateurs).
Work is an exchange of about half of your waking hours for the privilege of not dying in this society (because as far as food and shelter go, yes, we actually do need them, as well as healthcare, education, transportation, etc).
The only way to avoid struggle is to be rich - and that's because the rich had set it up that way.
Van Gogh never even had a career to give up, and his struggles weren't because it was hard for him to divide his attention.
I think we need work for more than food and shelter. We need a place in the world, something to strive for and something to help us find meaning.
You complete with others to stretch yourself.
People that build huge businesses keep push and building for more. Many like the money but are more motivated by the Vision of what they're building.
There is something built into us that wants to strive that wants to work.
Hobbies don't satisfy the same need. Hobbies are self directed and motivated. You don't get the same sense of achievement.
That said grinding 40 hours a week as a process worker is life sucking. That is not a good long term way of being. You need a hope of moving up to make that worth it.
> The only way to avoid struggle is to be rich - and that's because the rich had set it up that way.
Ummm, no? Not really? You think "the rich" could just magically end the need for work if they chose?
We live in an age of abundance relative to the past, but not to the point where we don't have to struggle for our existence, at least somewhat.
(Though to be clear, I am personally incredibly well placed in this society, and though I have to work, my profession is way easier than many other people's and my compensation far greater, as is true of many people on this forum)
>Ummm, no? Not really? You think "the rich" could just magically end the need for work if they chose?
Yes[1]. And it's not that I think so, it's that the likes of Bertrand Russel have observed it to be the case[2] back in the 50s.
If you think it's impossible to ensure that every citizen has access to food, shelter, education, transportation, and healthcare regardless of their employment status, you seriously underestimate how everything we do is struggling to fight over crumbles.
Of course it's possible. Most people will choose to work, still. Right now, it's not a choice.
> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
Something I believe, but can't really prove is that this is completely wrong and there's very little about the need for "work" that's socially determined. We are biological creatures that evolved under very specific circumstances. And "work" in the most basic sense is a big part of that. We need to be struggling to feed ourselves (or simulating it) -- every day. Most of us wither and die when that need is removed.
Most (I avoid saying all, because I'm not that smart) animals, when not surviving (finding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex) are super idle. It's energetically expensive to work, and, so far as I can tell, nothing has evolved to be energetically stressed.
If we're throwing around words like "evolution" we need to understand that we're talking about genetic survival (passing genes on through generations). The state of "struggling to feed ourselves" is directly antithetical to the goal of having sex. At best you could argue that the hypothesis that peacocks attract mates with their flamboyant tail feathers suggests that they've survived to maturity as intact as they are because of their good genes (survival in spite of being an easy, colorful target for predators), but that's a stretch.
> Most (I avoid saying all, because I'm not that smart) animals, when not surviving (finding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex) are super idle. It's energetically expensive to work, and, so far as I can tell, nothing has evolved to be energetically stressed.
"[F]inding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex" is the work I'm talking about. So, yes, animals are either working or they're "super idle." There's no third mode where they're, like, finding their true selves. They're either working or they're asleep.
Ok, I want to say "well how does sitting in a basement with 10 other people making data go from server a to database fit into that" but I feel like the common answer boils down to "ETL is just an abstraction of that work. It takes the place of finding food because [capitalism]"... so yeah, in capitalism, you're right. But capitalism is bad and is a bad excuse to do so many of the things that we do.
It can just be bad. Requiring a superior alternative us another kind of trick. Identifying problems and providing solutions are two different things. Combining the two is a clever way to set an artificial bar on what can be discussed.
We're probably just really, really far apart on potentially every point on which this conversation might want to turn. For example, I'm a capitalist and from your short response above it's likely that what I think is obvious is the exact opposite of everything you think is obvious, so I'm not sure there's hope of resolving much here.
It's more than a social fact. It's a consequence of living in a physical reality with physical wants and needs that require action to be satisfied. The best we can do is move the work around, and have someone else do it. (We can harness physical forces to take care of most of the work in the force-times-distance sense, but we're still a long way from moving the rest.) And the ultimate problem with moving it around so that we don't have to do any of it will be that it is likely to result in some outside entity having outsized power over our lives.
OP talks about 'work' in a particular way, as does the author of the piece. What we need is food, shelter and so on. 'Work' as in conflict with 'life' (i.e the work-life balance) is a social construct.
It didn't always use to be that way, and it doesn't have to. That we have physical needs is a fact. That we have alienated work from life, or family, or expressing ourselves is not. That work created an absentee father is not in the laws of physics, obviously, but that it's hard to perceive it as anything else is what OP pointed out, and that's something worth paying attention to.
The idea that you have to 'move work around' (kind of sounds like moving garbage around) wouldn't make sense to a person who is able to express themselves in their work. Ask a craftsman for example, an artist, or someone on a family farm.
The fact that people are detached from their work, that they're objects of their work, that their work dehumanizes them in extreme cases, that is a result of a particular mode of production we are living under. Someone for whom their work is an extension of their life, who are not detached from the products of their work, and for whom work strengthens their social relations, there is no work-life balance, because there is no work-life conflict.
> The idea that you have to 'move work around' (kind of sounds like moving garbage around) wouldn't make sense to a person who is able to express themselves in their work. Ask a craftsman for example, an artist, or someone on a family farm.
When I go over to the printmaking studio, I recognize that in principle someone else might be able to grind the limestone slabs I intend to use for printing, maintain the printing press, clean up the ink, or perform any number of tasks incidental to the expressive portion.
I am just as sure that anyone on a family farm knows they can, in principle, get someone else in the family to do work, and that hired hands exist, and can take care of many tasks or unpleasant chores. They may prefer to do the work themselves, so that they get better results, or have more control or feel useful, or because they have a duty to contribute productively.
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. It is essentially never entirely fun.
Yes go ahead and ask someone on a family farm. Most of them see it as a way to get some food and money, not a way to express themselves. Some of them love it, others hate it but don't have a practical way to get out.
"We need work" and "we things to get done" are different things in my mind. I agree just like anyone that we need certain things to get done to survive. "We need work" is a curious little phrase though. It's setup in the same way as "we need food", or "we need safety and security", or "we need to feel loved." The framing is that of a basic human need and it's my impression that's how many people see it. It's interesting that the language follows suit in a Metaphors We Live By[1]-type of way.
While it's not necessary that everyone works, some work is necessary. If people stopped showing up to the farms, or the water treatment plants, everyone would die. So, someone has to work.
Labeling "we need work" as only a social fact is a misguided kind of relativism. "Society has created arbitrary weights and values on which work gets rewards, therefore we only need work if we believe we need it". The logic is just plain faulty.
I've always wondered why we don't switch to a 20-30 hour work week or 4 work days a week...
And not in some bs "part time vs full time" but that we have enough humans on this freakin planet that you should only need to work 30 hours a week to live a healthy, balanced life.
You can and some people choose that. Same as you can choose to have only one adult in a pair do paid work.
What happens is that other humans do more hours of work per household and outbid you on things that you might otherwise want. Some people are OK with that and go on to live happy lives. Others get frustrated and join the race to keep up with the others. (Which I think is a choice that people should have; I would strongly oppose taking that choice away, but the end result is that lots of people are working lots of hours to buy lots of things.)
Also our regular work schedule, but people can retire earlier would be another nice form of balance.
IMO it's simply that money is a better motivator than equality. Money is tangible with easy to understand value, while equality is intangible and dubious in value, according to some.
Once you realize you can beat the guy working 20 hours a week by working 40 hours a week, you quickly find yourself optimizing for productivity over anything else. The rest of us get swept up in the current of the people that want it the most.
This is going to sound cold but we could save hundreds of billions by 'letting go' demented / terminal elders suffer undignified quality of life because their descendants, too guilty to let go, but to busy to visit, are happy to let the public pick up the bill
Well, "work" is a broad term. It can mean a paycheck, the gulag, or that todo you've been putting off because you want to finish the show. Lots more as well.
Some are meanings are constructs, but some are limitations of complete communication from a single English world.
I'm not saying that we all need to work for hyper-capitalistic machines. Or even anything remotely resembling a "business". But humans need to do semi-regular things that approximate work. Whether it's something like running a farm, coding programs, or passing lessons on to the next generation—we all need something semi-recurring, with some perception of value.
I do agree that the sense of duty towards work that is stereo-typically cultivated in Silicon Valley is a social construct and not at all a universal truth. THAT we can both agree is definitely a social construct.
That's not what work means. Productivity isn't work. Hence why people take time off work to take care of their kids or house. Work is a social relation. If you don't have that social relation, then nothing you do will be recognized as work.
To me when you write “we need work” is a social fact, I read “we need jobs/full employment.”
Work to me is a term that applies to any system doing a task; input->(processing)->output.
So like you’re saying, it’s “work” in a “biological sense” to learn wine.
Inherently we need to “work” but our social idea of work is arbitrary, a lot is busy work.
Police violence, don’t let government have weapons of mass destruction to police global violence, wind down superfluous industrialism, deflate chads whose dads own dealerships and be humans.
I'm not sure how "Dad sold his soul to work, regretted it forever, but couldn't change his ways" leads to the conclusion that "work/life balance should be difficult."
It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.
Most tech companies I'm familiar with (and probably companies in other fields as well) seem to think they own you, body and soul, and take issue with any indications otherwise.
It's because they are not penalized by that mindset. Employeees don't push back. Heck, some people will gladly sell their time for "passion" or "ambition".
> My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline.
This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of his sister.
You deserved more OP, your father was a coward in this situation and failed to step up.
I think there is a bit of a lack of empathy in your response. First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations. The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted. It does not indicate cowardice. It could be very difficult to switch one's frame of view to something that seems alien. It might have been just as difficult for the author's father to become an affectionate and involved parent, which you see as something he should be able to achieve, as it would be for a typical modern man to accept that plants have the same rights as people, which some future version of humanity might consider to be an obvious given.
Second, people grieve in different ways. Some might engage in self-destructive behavior. Others might fall into a deep depression and have trouble getting out of bed. The father might have found comfort with the routine of work where he could pretend everything was fine. He was at least aware enough to make sure his children were care for, by passing them to the grandmother. He might find seeing his wife or child too much to bear, as they remind him too much of his daughter. There is a reason why couples often separate if a child dies. He might not have the skills to deal with his grief, might not have had help, might not know where to get help, might not have even know he needed help.
Third, there are several different ways of parenting. One of which is what you mentioned, making sure the family has modest needs so that they can live within those means, reducing the burden on the parents to have to constantly strive for ever increasing wages. There are also parents who want to provide as much as possible for their children, the healthiest foods, the best medical care, exposure to many ideas and activities and cultures, which necessitates a tradeoff between effort put into work and direct time with family. It might be easy to agree that the extremes of the spectrum are poor choices, but harder to say where along the middle of the spectrum is the optimum. Which is the main point of the article, whether you agree or not.
> The author even wrote that the father wanted to be involved in his child's life, but did not have practice or models for being the kind of father the author wanted.
then the author's father should have figured it out. i don't have a lot of sympathy for people in problem solving fields that, for the life of them, somehow can't solve for family. You read the docs (books), figure it out, and seek SME's for guidance. Just like everything else.
Perhaps. Not everyone can learn everything, and blaming the father for his shortcomings because he was apparently smart in other fields ("in a problem solving field") is just callous. Yes, the world would have been slightly better if he could have done it. But sometimes the world is not as great as we would like, and people inside it do not live up to our (or even their own) expectations. They deserve empathy, not to be called cowards in internet comments by people who never knew them.
Where do you draw the line? It seems like any shortcoming can be traced back to some mix of nature or nurture, is it just universally unfair to expect things from other humans?
Of course even flawed people deserve some level of empathy, but there's a difference between empathy and immunity from responsibility or criticism.
> You read the docs (books), figure it out, and seek SME's for guidance. Just like everything else.
Going a little beyond the case of the article, for something like interpersonal relationships, there are as many methods as there are practitioners, many of them diametrically opposed to each other. What's considered best varies by culture, by demographics, fades in and out like fashion, works for some personalities and relationships and not others, might be harmful in ways not currently understood. It's not like math where there are empirically correct answers that can be logically proven. Certainly one can do what one considers best based on the current situation and general consensus, but I don't think it would be surprising if some people find that their best intentions are considered strange or unacceptable some time down the road, as society changes.
Getting back to the article, the author did not mention whether they talked to the father about their needs and wants. It is possible that the father thought he was solving for family quite adequately. We don't have both sides of the story.
I could perhaps have been hasty to condemn him to some degree. However I think it is critical to our society that men teach boys how to be men. I find that what is called toxic masculinity is often men who haven't been instructed and are doing a thin impersonation of what they believe it to be. We can't let other men off the hook so easily, given that those choices echo down the generations. I don't believe the posters father will ever read what I wrote, but I hope the poster does, and when he finds that his children need him I hope he understands how trivial someone else's deadline is in comparison to their need for their father.
>>> First, not everyone has learned how to express affection, especially some of the previous generations.
Lotsa things like personalities/emotional makeup can't be learned. Different people have different personalities. Sometimes you just need to live with what you have.
The first 10-15 years I worked my ass off. The last 10 I've taken it easy so I'm behind on all the new tech. The problem is now I want to work hard again but my skills are out of date. Despite the "unbelievably Strong" job market I'm finding it hard to get roles.
How would you characterize the differences between your years working your ass off and your years taking it easy? What did daily work look like during these eras?
He says "Work" and uses it as a synonym for "Career". I'm not sure about anyone else (though having read enough posts on this site, I know I speak for many), there are many kinds of work. I get log off from my job, these days, and play with my son and while he's being put to bed (no mean feat for my wife these days... I'd help if he'd allow it), I crack open the personal Linux box and start in on Rust code with the Bevy engine, for no reason other than self fulfillment.
It's work, of a sort. I'm not sure I'd call it fun. It has ups and downs, but not fun, exactly. There's definitely a learning curve, and some of it might help me in my career, but I kind of doubt it... maybe in the most ethereal sense. All the same, it's work. Probably the most fulfilling work I do all day. But it has definitive goals that are attainable, kind of like the MMO's I used to love playing. I entertain wonderful ideas about selling a product that will never happen and I'm not sure I'd want to do it even if it was a viable product. Being a developer and a salesman/CEO are so vastly different, I wouldn't want to make the switch really. There are days I don't even enjoy managing the small team I do, and they're nice.
I hop on the treadmill or bike, hit the weights in the garage, and I hate them... and that's work. But I do it. That one's practice with a purpose, though, so I'm not sure that gets lumped in.
I know other people who garden like it's their born profession when they get home. It's amazing. People who knit and sew. Hunters who take it to extreme levels and stockpile meat for the year. All of it work, while they still have careers.
It sounds like the author's father never recovered from extreme trauma, which is a fate many face. I'm not sure that says anything about a job/life balance.
What a silly headline. What's wrong with doing a good job at your 9-5 and coming home with a clear mind to be with your family?
To be honest I work too hard, but I'm not deluded that I'm somehow an especially good person for doing so. The world is full of awesome people whose energy mostly goes to things outside their jobs, and who make more meaningful contributions because of this.
This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members.
Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.
If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.
When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.
It is not worth it but people do it again an again.
People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.
Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI agree. Why shouldn't you? I've never heard anyone say "I wish I'd put more time and effort into work". I -have- heard "I wish I was paid more", and if effort equates to that (from all observations of my career, I remain unconvinced) I can see that changing your minimum (i.e., from "minimum required to not get fired" to "minimum required to get to the next level"), but going above and beyond that minimum doesn't extrinsically affect you. So if intrinsically you value 'life' more than 'work' there...better to take that time/effort and put it into life.
This article just made it clear how ephemeral work meaning is, and how important life meaning is, and how important it is to subjugate the former to the latter. Which I agree, seems at odds with the title.
If we assume the following premise from the article is true...
> The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame.
The article makes a much more compelling case that the life side is worth quite a lot, and the work side isn't worth much... Meaning work/life balance should be easy.
Indeed. If we assume "work" is doing something you wouldn't otherwise do, then absolutely, you should be asking that question. And for most people, that's likely true of almost any employment.
Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community.
"Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.
After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?
If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.
That is untrue. There is ample evidence that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than industrialized societies. Just to name two sources I've recently read: Harari covers it in Sapiens, and before that Mumford covered it in Technics and Human Development.
This seems to be why a lot people feel much more fulfilled when then venture out into nature for a decent amount of time. The things they do there directly impact their survival. I agree that people do need work in that sense.
If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.
The older I get, the more I understand those people who only did enough to keep their job. I used to feel it was an ethical obligation to do my best, but I'm realizing that that is a one-sided view. The opposite argument was always "they don't treat me as well as they can" or something like that, and so they excused their own behavior... And I get it now.
I have no doubt that there are many garbage collectors who find their job rewarding... But I've also no doubt that there are many who just do it for the money, and would be just as happy (or more so) if their needs were met by society and they could concentrate on something they enjoyed instead.
FWIW, I think it's important that people do things that they feel contribute to society. But that doesn't have to be "work".
But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs.
It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.
[1] https://davidgraeber.org/articles/
Not only that, but it's probably true even less often when looking at the totality of jobs everywhere.
Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future.
However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy later. The biggest issue I have with pensions is that it entices people to just endure whatever hardships they have so that they can stop doing it when they're old.
It happens at both ends of your career: wait a bit to have kids, then when you're old and it turns out the game really wasn't worth it, don't complain and just retire. In the mean time you lose the ability to see your grandchildren, plus the org you're working for doesn't get the old timers telling them things are totally messed up.
People are always spending today planning for tomorrow. Tomorrow then becomes today and the process repeats. People often forget you live your life today.
He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html
It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored.
If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.
> "Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited."
Not "of course"; it's typically said or implied that even prime-age healthy males would have to work like abused pack horses and still barely survive. A limited data point it is, but there is another - his same scheme includes elderly women building their own homes, and young schoolchildren building their own school. Turning mud into bricks and bricks into a single story one or two room building, working together with no deadlines, doesn't need the labours of Hercules. The datapoint is not just "it's possible to be a subsistence farmer" which we did know, but "we always talk of subsistence farming as gruelling long hard work which leads to things like Russian peasants eating cabbage soup then starving to death in winter; here is a real live example of a community subsistence farming and surviving with at least an order of magnitude less work than commonly assumed, maybe more".
> "That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored."
He couldn't, he doesn't have the money or any marketable skills, he never did become a wealthy employee who choose to give it up for a rural life; from that page I linked "I worked hard but had no savings, just enough to make me survive day by day. I was disappointed with my life in the city. I couldn’t compete with anyone. I felt I had failed".
> "If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result."
Interesting that you've gone from "he could fly back to the city any time he wanted" as a dismissal to "he'd have nowhere to go if he needed city resources" as a dismissal in such a short time. But yes, no doubt those things could happen, he does say "learned to do many kinds of self-healing" and no doubt that does not include making antibiotics, anaesthesia, surgeons, dental fillings or living to 95 on a cocktail of statins and beta blockers and blood pressure pills and anticoagulants and antidepressents and metformin and all the rest.
The big question is not "how romantic is it" but whether "I do not feel bad about myself anymore", "When I started to do more things by myself, I have more confidence and less fear", "now I enjoy spending my life with my family and friends and plants" are worth the price compared to having readily available opticians and doctors while feeling like an isolated unhappy failure endlessly losing a forever-competition in city jobs while building no community.
Pick at the verbiage all you like; an American playing at being a poor subsistence farmer is theatre. The guy gave a TED talk after all. Did he do that from his 3rd-world farm?
> "Jon’s world view, from his upbringing in the rural fields of Northeastern Thailand"
> "Jon has over 30 years experience of being an organic farmer"
That's more than "playing".
These are all things that I can't do. On top of that, even if I could build a house from clay bricks that I made myself, I would be sleeping outside until the bricks and house were complete.
This doesn't sound like a very good counterpoint to me. I never said that working in a big city is the _only_ way to live. My point is only that the modern economy allows us to provide goods and services to other people and businesses, which in turn allows a small subset of workers to provide the necessary food and goods for survival of the entire society.
So, from that angle, working is not useless, it is just a proxy for what you would be doing if you had to provide food and shelter for yourself.
Some people find this idea of living off the land and growing your own food to be romantic. I don't, I enjoy modern society, and I feel like 40 hours a week is a ridiculously small investment to put in for what I get in return.
In the example you gave, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of current people would actually starve and die if they tried it. This TED talk speaker _grew up in rural Thailand_ and apparently had all of the tools to live this way. Most of us do not have that experience.
Very uninteresting counterpoint.
This modern economy is the exact religion that preaches the same gospel in the blog post: Maslow's pyramid of needs dictates that you need to work. Which is.. fine, I guess? My problem with that is that the work has become super productive in the past decades and that excess production allows only a fraction of people to stop working. Coupled with replacing the benefits of an actual community with the downgrade which is a workplace to give you that sense of belonging, self-sufficiency propaganda and employer-only provided healthcare, you get a nation of wage slaves.
We don't really need to work. I mean not all of us. A lot of the work done nowadays is bullshit [1]. The pandemic kinda showed us exactly who needs to go work to keep society going. The rest is just the result of:
- inertial protestant ethic
- wealth hoarding by the owners of production
- people tied to their workplace are easier to persuade/manage/manipulate politically
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Work is good for the worker. Because humans need a purpose in life. We don't even need to experiment to see what society would be like if no one worked and a few robots produced our food. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking this would be a utopia - no, it would be a worse dystopia than you could possibly imagine.
Take away people's purpose, and you will be left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people with lots of time on their hands. Pretty clear recipe for constant depression and war.
I'll read the book before I comment on it directly.
That's unnecessarily condescending.
> Work is good for the worker.
That's some hardcore boomer logic right there..
> Because humans need a purpose in life.
Work is work and jobs are jobs. You can work without a job and you can have a purpose in life without a 9 to 5. Homemakers don't work or have no purpose in life? You're talking about a different thing here.. I was referring to what people are required to do in order to survive, eat and have shelter in modern society, not have purpose and fulfillment. Does caring for sick relatives with no pay constitute work in your view? Or is that person a slacker and a burden on society? If your purpose in life is your shitty 9 to 5 job then you kinda failed at life. I'm pretty sure the person blowing the leaves of the sidewalk doesn't stay awake at night with an existential life crisis thinking that he missed a spot.
It's the exact same narrative I always have to defend against when talking about financial independence. This is not to say people will be idle and just sit around doing nothing. People still do 'things' whether or not the things they do make money or not.
> left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people
There's that disgusting protestant work ethic again. It's really baked into the fabric of our society.. It's not your fault. Read a book or two, open your mind, I guarantee you'll recover.
You may find the options they offer to be unacceptable, but what if they didn’t exist? What options available to you if that were the case are not available to you because they do exist?
As far as I can see our current system is beneficial, if only because it allows people additional choices of how to live their lives.
The option to share resources in an egalitarian way so that people can meet their basic needs without subordination.
It doesn't need to be taken to that extreme. I find it hard to believe that the idea that work must take up all of your time, and any less means you're going to starve is this pervasive.
It is not unimaginable that we can improve things. We're constantly making improvements to efficiency, productivity, sustainability. We get more done in our time now than at any point in history. The same will be true tomorrow.
Why then, are so many still working such grueling hours?
In this country, and many others, the share of productivity gains has increasingly gone to capital rather than labor. Although I think that this is only part of it. Part of it is cultural, this ideology that work gives life meaning, and to reject it can mean losing a lot.
I'm pretty lucky myself, my job doesn't stress me out, it pays the bills and leaves me with some disposable income. A lot of people would describe me as unambitious, not driven, etc. I'd say I have it made.
1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing.
2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc.
3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc.
If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain.
Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important.
His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen
Yes, business is not all there is to life, especially if I am an individual contributor who doesn't reap most of the rewards of the success of the business. However, my livelihood can be affected by a business becoming unsuccessful. I have seen it - I was on unemployment when my first child was born because my employer ran out of money.
So I work to try and keep any business that I work for afloat. I don't think it's much different than if I were a hunter-gatherer and had to spend time collecting food to eat. I want to do everything I can to make sure there is food to collect tomorrow.
As a second point, reincarnation is a common religious concept, and there could very well be another exciting life after this one (although you probably shouldn't peg any plans on that).
My parents didn't have any exciting projects either, in fact, children's lives depend on my mother who is a pediatric cardiologist in 3rd world country. Nevertheless, she came back from work and read the book with me before bed. I couldn't ask for more.
But when people pull long shifts to get the next version of the browser that makes marginal improvements instead of spending time with friends/family/doing a hobby (essentially living, not working) and take it as a medal of honor, they are missing a lot in life. People working late hours to put the food on the table and people deliberately working late and then using it as an excuse are different. If they're the latter, please don't tell that they're having hard time balancing work/life.
Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before.
The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
For some of those other companies, a TPS report is required.
I think it's good to be critical, we can always improve the system. But I also personally believe our society is actually incredible at self-optimizing, and we are pretty darn close to an ideal system in practice. It's easy to focus on the bad, but our society has produced truly immeasurable good (very little relative violence, hunger, boredom, etc.) Of course it can be improved, and there are some real problems, particularly around wealth inequality. But I can't help but think that we're doing pretty damn good.
It's not "modern work" but work-the-social-institution. Which is the primary definition of "work."
What they don't mean is productive activity. Every productive activity that takes place within the social institution of work also takes place outside of that social institution. For example, farming, building construction, cooking, cleaning, education -- all of these take place both inside and outside of work.
Furthermore, not everyone can survive without specialization of labor. Prior to specialization of labor, it was much more common for people to die young, and the world's population reflected this.
What I'm saying is Maslow's scale is tipped upside down with an overabundance of leisure and scarcity of high quality basic fulfillment. There's so much entertainment, that we can afford for a few markets to crash and disappear, hence why I called them "made-up".
I think you've got cause and effect reversed. It's our exceptional progress on basic fulfillment that has enabled our economy to support these so-called "made-up" jobs.
That’s just what it takes to live, we forget that because of how far removed we are from actual survival. But take away modern society, and the world is much harsher and much less fulfilling.
Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. I can spend two or three weeks idling most of the time, but after that I need something to direct my energy and concentration toward. I need a goal that stretches my abilities, or I find myself constantly battling a depressive spiral.
What people need is to be able to channel their energy into something productive, whether it be learning, hobbies, helping others in a meaningful way, or maybe some sort of self-improvement in terms of health.
I suppose you could put all of that under the vague umbrella of "work", but for the purpose of having a conversation that's not arguing about semantics, work is what most people do to generate an income to support their life goals and activities.
> Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here.
I've also gone through a few such periods, in between jobs. Best time of my life. Even though I didn't accomplish a whole lot during it that you could put on paper and call work. Learned a few things, improved friendships, and did a little room remodel.
If your passion is painting, and its something you would do for free, then fulfilling your artistic potential is still work. It still requires hours upon hours of deliberate practice. The great masters would spend years working on a single painting. You don't think there would be times when they just didn't feel like making progress? Where they wanted to just take the day off and hang out at a bar with their friends?
Part of the human condition is struggle, imo. That's what I think the OP is getting at when he says that human beings need work. Maybe not a 9-5, but we all need something worth staving off instant gratification for.
Some people still consider tasks they enjoy doing a form of "work". Work doesn't have to be compensated activities engaged in out of a desperate need to provide basic necessities.
Just different people using the same word to mean different things.
Would your abilities feel stretched by being a cashier? How about a janitor? Waiter?
These jobs are what "work" actually is for most people. I think most people could go without doing those things.
Intellectual stimulation, or goals that stretch one's abilities, don't have to come from work (and for most people those things and "work" are hardly related at all). Therefore, saying we (as humans) "need" work is generally incorrect (at least for the reasons you stated) since most people don't even get what you say we "need" from work anyway.
Just different definitions of "work". I think the sense meant by those saying people "need work" is "meaningful toil". Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.
So cashier, janitor, waiter would fit that broad definition, even though they are not a focus of intellectual life. But there can be other types of work that also fulfill intellectual needs, that might be more fulfilling for many (most? all?) people.
I'm going to disagree on this simplification. There is a common definition of work, e.g. the definition used in the context of work/life balance (i.e. the context of the original article), that is widely used; redefining it to be as broad as you've described is detrimental to the conversation.
> Something that requires focused effort, and done for some tangible purpose.
Essentially everything can be made to fit this definition, making it, I think, not very useful.
The author literally said "We need food. We need shelter." right after saying we need work.
I meaningfully toiled over a 3D print of a twisted hexagonal mesh over a tube around a 5,4 torus knot yesterday. Guess how much it helped me pay rent.
Your reply is entirely reasonable but it seems the gp already covered what you wrote and anticipated it in his disclaimer: ">It needn’t be employment,[...]"
He just happened to use the imprecise label "work" -- which is so tainted and overloaded that one can't re-use that word to also describe "non-employment intellectual activity" because it inadvertently tricks people into talking past each other.
(E.g. Notice that you used "work" as synonym for "employment" but the gp did not.)
With that in mind, I'll just agree with your analysis, redefining "work" to include "non-employment" is detrimental to the conversation. When people discuss work/life balance (i.e. in the original article), they are (almost universally) not talking about balancing intellectually stimulating hobbies and the rest of life. We are, from the onset, talking about jobs, i.e. employment.
Additionally, I think my original comment is still useful when discussing the more common definition of work.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all... but I do that kind of interesting. I like to think that if I had unlimited free time, there's no way I'd ever be bored, I have so many things that I love doing... No way I'd give up 20 hours of my week just to go work as a cashier when I don't need to.
That said... things might change when I get older.
First, as I said in my comment, the man in your example is likely not working in order to "stretch [his] abilities" as was the context of my comment...
Second, I'm not sure that doing something out of boredom is equivalent to a "need," regardless of how one might describe it.
Third, it seems to me that many people's only source of purpose is work (partially because they must work exhaustively to survive), so, when the need or ability to work is removed, they have nothing else; the idea that "work" is either a necessity or a noble pursuit in of itself only serves to reinforce this outlook and the resulting behavior (i.e. deriving all purpose from work).
I don't want to push too hard, but it should be somewhat self-evident who might benefit from a culture that perpetuates a myth of work as necessity.
Or: having a public-facing job is something to do that also served as a social outlet for him (especially if it's related to his hobbies) that was free (how many social activities (the kind where you meet people, not the kind where you spend time with folks you already know) are free these days?).
Every time I go to a nursery I think about how much fun it would be to "work" there, if I didn't have to consider the pay, because I love plants and talking about plants and making chit-chat with strangers.
Sure but that is taking a short break from your job/career. Its not like leaving school and never working.
"It is difficult for a man who always has a full stomach to put his mind to some use. Are there not players of liubo and go? Even playing these games is better than being idle." -- Confucious
Intellectual life and work are completely orthogonal.
People have been taught to confuse them because it benefits the ruling class.
Alas, alas, work has been co-opted to mean employment in most people's minds.
There's learning, there's helping, there's contributing, there are a million things that aren't idling and require effort, but net you with no money.
So they don't count as "work".
Nonsense.
Most men derive purpose in life from work (ie. providing) - this is basic psychology. Even male millionaires start new companies so they have something to do with their time.
Women have entered the workplace, but they're mostly driven by insecurity, not purpose. As one woman programmer told me, "You want to be world-class. I want to sit in my garden patio."
Also, give the fruity prose a break, this is HN, not Lapham's Quarterly.
Rather, I think that this post is about balance, and about being emotionally present. He's saying that it should be a constant struggle to balance off things that you care about, because that shows you care. The only way to avoid the struggle is to cease caring, and that means you push something out of your mind that you really should be paying attention to because it's uncomfortable.
I've got plenty of stories about a dad who went the other way - full time househusband, gave up his career entirely soon after my sister and I were born - but they're a bit too personal to share on HN. It's not all roses and sunshine on that side either, though.
Yay, survival should be a struggle, because it shows you care (about increasing the ROI for the shareholders you'll never see)!
"We need work" is justified by "we need shelter and food".
The only thing a constant struggle shows is that you don't have the freedom to choose how you spend your life.
What people need is a vocation, a calling, fulfilment from creativity or helping other people out. The things that we call hobbies, that is (and people who enjoy them - amateurs).
Work is an exchange of about half of your waking hours for the privilege of not dying in this society (because as far as food and shelter go, yes, we actually do need them, as well as healthcare, education, transportation, etc).
The only way to avoid struggle is to be rich - and that's because the rich had set it up that way.
Van Gogh never even had a career to give up, and his struggles weren't because it was hard for him to divide his attention.
You complete with others to stretch yourself.
People that build huge businesses keep push and building for more. Many like the money but are more motivated by the Vision of what they're building.
There is something built into us that wants to strive that wants to work.
Hobbies don't satisfy the same need. Hobbies are self directed and motivated. You don't get the same sense of achievement.
That said grinding 40 hours a week as a process worker is life sucking. That is not a good long term way of being. You need a hope of moving up to make that worth it.
Ummm, no? Not really? You think "the rich" could just magically end the need for work if they chose?
We live in an age of abundance relative to the past, but not to the point where we don't have to struggle for our existence, at least somewhat.
(Though to be clear, I am personally incredibly well placed in this society, and though I have to work, my profession is way easier than many other people's and my compensation far greater, as is true of many people on this forum)
Yes[1]. And it's not that I think so, it's that the likes of Bertrand Russel have observed it to be the case[2] back in the 50s.
If you think it's impossible to ensure that every citizen has access to food, shelter, education, transportation, and healthcare regardless of their employment status, you seriously underestimate how everything we do is struggling to fight over crumbles.
Of course it's possible. Most people will choose to work, still. Right now, it's not a choice.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
[2]https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
Something I believe, but can't really prove is that this is completely wrong and there's very little about the need for "work" that's socially determined. We are biological creatures that evolved under very specific circumstances. And "work" in the most basic sense is a big part of that. We need to be struggling to feed ourselves (or simulating it) -- every day. Most of us wither and die when that need is removed.
Most (I avoid saying all, because I'm not that smart) animals, when not surviving (finding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex) are super idle. It's energetically expensive to work, and, so far as I can tell, nothing has evolved to be energetically stressed.
If we're throwing around words like "evolution" we need to understand that we're talking about genetic survival (passing genes on through generations). The state of "struggling to feed ourselves" is directly antithetical to the goal of having sex. At best you could argue that the hypothesis that peacocks attract mates with their flamboyant tail feathers suggests that they've survived to maturity as intact as they are because of their good genes (survival in spite of being an easy, colorful target for predators), but that's a stretch.
"[F]inding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex" is the work I'm talking about. So, yes, animals are either working or they're "super idle." There's no third mode where they're, like, finding their true selves. They're either working or they're asleep.
I'd love to hear a different argument.
It didn't always use to be that way, and it doesn't have to. That we have physical needs is a fact. That we have alienated work from life, or family, or expressing ourselves is not. That work created an absentee father is not in the laws of physics, obviously, but that it's hard to perceive it as anything else is what OP pointed out, and that's something worth paying attention to.
The idea that you have to 'move work around' (kind of sounds like moving garbage around) wouldn't make sense to a person who is able to express themselves in their work. Ask a craftsman for example, an artist, or someone on a family farm.
The fact that people are detached from their work, that they're objects of their work, that their work dehumanizes them in extreme cases, that is a result of a particular mode of production we are living under. Someone for whom their work is an extension of their life, who are not detached from the products of their work, and for whom work strengthens their social relations, there is no work-life balance, because there is no work-life conflict.
When I go over to the printmaking studio, I recognize that in principle someone else might be able to grind the limestone slabs I intend to use for printing, maintain the printing press, clean up the ink, or perform any number of tasks incidental to the expressive portion.
I am just as sure that anyone on a family farm knows they can, in principle, get someone else in the family to do work, and that hired hands exist, and can take care of many tasks or unpleasant chores. They may prefer to do the work themselves, so that they get better results, or have more control or feel useful, or because they have a duty to contribute productively.
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. It is essentially never entirely fun.
1. https://www.biblio.com/9780226468013
While it's not necessary that everyone works, some work is necessary. If people stopped showing up to the farms, or the water treatment plants, everyone would die. So, someone has to work.
Labeling "we need work" as only a social fact is a misguided kind of relativism. "Society has created arbitrary weights and values on which work gets rewards, therefore we only need work if we believe we need it". The logic is just plain faulty.
And not in some bs "part time vs full time" but that we have enough humans on this freakin planet that you should only need to work 30 hours a week to live a healthy, balanced life.
https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/602609/cheapest-small-...
What happens is that other humans do more hours of work per household and outbid you on things that you might otherwise want. Some people are OK with that and go on to live happy lives. Others get frustrated and join the race to keep up with the others. (Which I think is a choice that people should have; I would strongly oppose taking that choice away, but the end result is that lots of people are working lots of hours to buy lots of things.)
IMO it's simply that money is a better motivator than equality. Money is tangible with easy to understand value, while equality is intangible and dubious in value, according to some.
Once you realize you can beat the guy working 20 hours a week by working 40 hours a week, you quickly find yourself optimizing for productivity over anything else. The rest of us get swept up in the current of the people that want it the most.
Is there anything you would die for?
Is there anything you fear worse than death?
Some are meanings are constructs, but some are limitations of complete communication from a single English world.
I'm not saying that we all need to work for hyper-capitalistic machines. Or even anything remotely resembling a "business". But humans need to do semi-regular things that approximate work. Whether it's something like running a farm, coding programs, or passing lessons on to the next generation—we all need something semi-recurring, with some perception of value.
I do agree that the sense of duty towards work that is stereo-typically cultivated in Silicon Valley is a social construct and not at all a universal truth. THAT we can both agree is definitely a social construct.
Every system breaks down, unless it is maintained through energy/work.
At the most basic level, we need food to maintain our system. How will you get it without work?
To me when you write “we need work” is a social fact, I read “we need jobs/full employment.”
Work to me is a term that applies to any system doing a task; input->(processing)->output.
So like you’re saying, it’s “work” in a “biological sense” to learn wine.
Inherently we need to “work” but our social idea of work is arbitrary, a lot is busy work.
Police violence, don’t let government have weapons of mass destruction to police global violence, wind down superfluous industrialism, deflate chads whose dads own dealerships and be humans.
It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.
Most tech companies I'm familiar with (and probably companies in other fields as well) seem to think they own you, body and soul, and take issue with any indications otherwise.
It's always about incentives.
This story is a good reminder to me to continue to live within my means. In this situation, fuck deadlines! I'm taking my son to a ball game and helping him grieve the loss of his sister.
You deserved more OP, your father was a coward in this situation and failed to step up.
Second, people grieve in different ways. Some might engage in self-destructive behavior. Others might fall into a deep depression and have trouble getting out of bed. The father might have found comfort with the routine of work where he could pretend everything was fine. He was at least aware enough to make sure his children were care for, by passing them to the grandmother. He might find seeing his wife or child too much to bear, as they remind him too much of his daughter. There is a reason why couples often separate if a child dies. He might not have the skills to deal with his grief, might not have had help, might not know where to get help, might not have even know he needed help.
Third, there are several different ways of parenting. One of which is what you mentioned, making sure the family has modest needs so that they can live within those means, reducing the burden on the parents to have to constantly strive for ever increasing wages. There are also parents who want to provide as much as possible for their children, the healthiest foods, the best medical care, exposure to many ideas and activities and cultures, which necessitates a tradeoff between effort put into work and direct time with family. It might be easy to agree that the extremes of the spectrum are poor choices, but harder to say where along the middle of the spectrum is the optimum. Which is the main point of the article, whether you agree or not.
then the author's father should have figured it out. i don't have a lot of sympathy for people in problem solving fields that, for the life of them, somehow can't solve for family. You read the docs (books), figure it out, and seek SME's for guidance. Just like everything else.
Of course even flawed people deserve some level of empathy, but there's a difference between empathy and immunity from responsibility or criticism.
Going a little beyond the case of the article, for something like interpersonal relationships, there are as many methods as there are practitioners, many of them diametrically opposed to each other. What's considered best varies by culture, by demographics, fades in and out like fashion, works for some personalities and relationships and not others, might be harmful in ways not currently understood. It's not like math where there are empirically correct answers that can be logically proven. Certainly one can do what one considers best based on the current situation and general consensus, but I don't think it would be surprising if some people find that their best intentions are considered strange or unacceptable some time down the road, as society changes.
Getting back to the article, the author did not mention whether they talked to the father about their needs and wants. It is possible that the father thought he was solving for family quite adequately. We don't have both sides of the story.
Lotsa things like personalities/emotional makeup can't be learned. Different people have different personalities. Sometimes you just need to live with what you have.
He also had two young children to provide for on his own. That seems to be omitted from this story.
It's work, of a sort. I'm not sure I'd call it fun. It has ups and downs, but not fun, exactly. There's definitely a learning curve, and some of it might help me in my career, but I kind of doubt it... maybe in the most ethereal sense. All the same, it's work. Probably the most fulfilling work I do all day. But it has definitive goals that are attainable, kind of like the MMO's I used to love playing. I entertain wonderful ideas about selling a product that will never happen and I'm not sure I'd want to do it even if it was a viable product. Being a developer and a salesman/CEO are so vastly different, I wouldn't want to make the switch really. There are days I don't even enjoy managing the small team I do, and they're nice.
I hop on the treadmill or bike, hit the weights in the garage, and I hate them... and that's work. But I do it. That one's practice with a purpose, though, so I'm not sure that gets lumped in.
I know other people who garden like it's their born profession when they get home. It's amazing. People who knit and sew. Hunters who take it to extreme levels and stockpile meat for the year. All of it work, while they still have careers.
We need action towards results.
We do not need 16 hour workdays.
To be honest I work too hard, but I'm not deluded that I'm somehow an especially good person for doing so. The world is full of awesome people whose energy mostly goes to things outside their jobs, and who make more meaningful contributions because of this.
Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.
If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.
When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.
It is not worth it but people do it again an again.
People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.
Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.