CNN, like Fox News and every other news organisation, are entertainment channels giving the public what they want.
This is like blaming your alcoholism on Budweiser or your obesity on McDonalds. Sure, it’s certainly part of the problem, but it’s hardly the primary cause.
People are lazy, and learning the truth about complicated things is harder than just making your mind up quickly based on garbage information.
That's... Absolutely not how TV works. They don't create an endless series of alternative formats and beta test them. They ape existing formats for the biggest slice of the same pool of already addicted viewers. So over time, a local maxima is achieved - serving eye catching 'hot' stimuli, violence primary (due to American cultural prohibitions around sex). Since there's little choice (red or blue essentially) the public can't express their preference for an alternative through anything other than switching mediums. And in a more democratic medium - youtube, facebook etc - you don't see the same level of artifice, bombasticism, violence etc, in the most popular videos.
Right, it was "the media"'s fault. New "devil made me so it"? I suppose the cops killing unarmed people and maiming journalists also did it because of the media and free time.
What are your views on the cause of the american civil war and war of independence? Did the papers back then cause it all?
I can't believe how fast casual racism is regressing.
Social instability and riots - I assume you are referring to Black Lives Matter - did not happen due to "too much free time", JFC. They happened because police were routinely murdering Black people and there was/is a massive disparity in wealth.
I have no horse in this race being outside the states.
Yet from here, BLM seems to clearly be a US election phenomena rather than a general desire to fix things. It basically disappeared after the last election and the election before that.
> BLM seems to clearly be a US election phenomena rather than a general desire to fix things.
Being one of the few levers that citizens have to pull, it is unsurprising that elections create stir over issues that are perpetually important.
Nevertheless with respect to the trend chart, correlation ≠ causation. The spring/summer peak in BLM activity was temporally related to the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. Were other factors involved? Likely; but it would take more social science to tease out, rather than Google trends.
> I have no horse in this race
Maybe not in a direct political sense. I don’t live in the U.S. either; but the BLM protests in my country pointed to a moral solidarity that transcends political boundaries. “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
> BLM protests in my country pointed to a moral solidarity that transcends political boundaries
What actual changes occurred in your country due to the Black Lives Matter movement in a legal sense? Did it result in less police deaths? Covid probably threw a spanner in the works judging such things but for many countries it's likely more their own way to vote on US politics by having people out in the streets than a domestic issue.
It's a US phenomena exported and regurgitated by many others across the west who simply don't have these systemic problems with their police force at all. This concern only really appears once every four years in foreign countries.
Why is no one protesting today, truly? Did the whole BLM movement just decide that brutality stopped? The stats seem the same.
Think it will appear again across the planet in the lead up to the 2024 US election. And your country, along with mine, will be highly concerned about police brutality that doesn't exist in our own nations.
There was clear and undeniable video evidence available right while it happened. That changed because it took away the narrative control from the cops.
Is also not new. There's a long history of documented video evidence police killing people. Walter Scott comes to mind but I think it goes back much longer than that. That one in my mind was even worse
You must be joking. Free time caused riots and protests? Even the device you are using to view this post is a result of people having free time from having to farm and hunt between burying others due to preventable illness.
An argument can even be made that much of the success of america and the west is the result of free time gained by slavery, colonialism and armed robbery of land.
"Cops should stop killing us" vs "no, cops are great" and you look at that and say "you guys have too much free time, you wouldn't care otherwise"? I smell ulterior motive here.
If you check previous revolutions and mass movements, overstressed, overworked and underpaid masses are as dangerous, or even more than, well, just overstressed masses. It's not live, laugh, love white middle class that was rioting, because WFH was too much of a burden.
You mean when people were forced to stay home for months, deprived of social contact, and denied a normal life due to a global pandemic which was killing their friends and family?
Yes surely this is a good representative experiment.
Too much free time can be as bad as little free time (). In another thread from today there is a game for simulating an economic model, I wonder if in that model they consider the amount of free time as an important nonlinear variable.
"can be as bad" does not convey the same meaning as "'may' be 'almost' as bad," as the article actually says. Furthermore the article does not say the 'badness' is equivalent. In fact it says:
> Once again, the researchers found that higher levels of free time were significantly associated with higher levels of well-being, but only up to a point. After that, excess free time was not associated with greater well-being.
The point made is more similar to wealth correlating to happiness up to a point. The article concludes that it's a sense of purpose that matters to people, not work. Your comment is a bit obfuscating.
Freedom is an important part of the American identity (arguably the defining part, at least aspirationally), and I believe in freedom.
But we should recognize that humans are sometimes happier having some clear directions to follow and tasks to perform. Depends on the person and the situation, of course.
But it's also human nature that everyone wants to be the one giving the directions, even if it makes them unhappy.
I don't think it's possible to say anything definitive like this about human nature. Are people happier taking orders, or is it easier due to conditioning? Is that happiness?
A lot of jobs, if not a majority, tend to be jobs with no future prospect, low pay, little to no healthcare insurance, and an absence of meaning. Those jobs didn't offer something to drive or strive towards then, and still do not. Why would one want to live for this, slaving away?
Thinking there is inherent meaning in salaried or at-will work is more ideological than factual. This can be scrapped for: being creative or productive with one's time. And this isn't tied to a job contract to an employer that is, more often than not, brutal to you.
This comment is absolutely drenched in ideology, the kind of Protestantism that will grind the whole planet into dust if we let it. Sheer, absolute drivel.
"As we all know" aside - what's wrong with slacking off? Does painting, writing poetry, playing sports with kids, learning an instrument count as slacking off? Why does spending 8 hours a day at a job where you perform some rote, pointless, abstract task - like sending emails and having meetings about advertising - count as _not_ slacking off?
Obesity, suicide and depression have not been rising under conditions of an excess of leisure, they have been rising under a regimen of constant, precarious toil for less return, more alienated from the benefit of the work itself.
Human beings thrive when the boot of your smug ideology is taken off of their throats.
As a European, that was something that I just couldn't get my head around when living in the States. People always needed to be "busy", and if it was just mowing the damn lawn again for no real reason. Almost like they feel guilty doing nothing.
I don’t know anyone who would call “painting, writing poetry, playing sports with kids, learning an instrument” slacking off.
And having lived in both wealthy communities and among poor communities in developing countries it amazing the general mood among the poor seems to ve much more positive and less anxious and neurotic.
My interpretation is humans thrive when they have a purpose and for many people work is a purpose either what they produce themselves or what they use their gains for - family, children, building a future.
And when there is no purpose and there is no need to do anything, many people become lost and fall into negative self-harm.
So no, it’s not that work is a requirement, but productivity in whatever does seem a natural fit for humans.
> And having lived in both wealthy communities and among poor communities in developing countries it amazing the general mood among the poor seems to ve much more positive and less anxious and neurotic.
I've noticed that too. Here are some of the potential reasons that come to my mind:
1. Their day to day lives are less complex. If they work in jobs, they usually perform a routine set of tasks that can be more or less done on mental autopilot. If they're self-employed (usually farmers), they have to plan and worry about the future, but at least they're not subject to a set of pointless, unknown and arbitrary rules like people in complex office jobs are.
2. Their jobs are (on average) more physical and involve more genuine contact with people.
3. They often stay around the place where they were born and when their entire family is. This gives them both rich social life, help with raising children, as well as a safety net.
4. They're not conditioned to strive to be excellent, an "industry leader" or a great artist etc. They're perfectly content with boring/low-status jobs as long as they pay for the important things in their lives, such as their family.
The only thing I agree with is people got the leasure time and loved it.
Most people don't enjoy their job, or jobs.
Most people don't like commuting rediculious distances just to make rent, and eat.
Most people realalized during Covid they might have been happier.
The virtual/physical infrastructure wouldn't have been built with work from home. This is our first experiment with working from home, and it went pretty well. Many jobs, with the help of technology, could be done at home.
We still don't know why so many lousy jobs are going unfilled. My take is adult kids moved home--a home they will never afford, and lived with their parents, and it was better than paying 80% of your paycheck for a lousy apartment.
I've always felt the world has two types of people. Those that built their lives around work. They come home, and even like to talk about it. You take their job away, and yes, they loose their identity.
Then there's the slacker, like myself. Work is unpleasant, unfulfilling, mind numbing, thing I just have to do. I don't enjoy really any of it be it the early show up times, or my superiors, and especially the long commute. I could care less about the company. I would be robbing the joint blind if the penalties weren't so severe.
I do know this, but most people don't have a say in the matter:
I have known way to many males wait to long to retire, and because all their personality was geared towards working don't last long. And we men just die so dam early to begin with.
I once got a peak at some union delagates debating retirement ages. It was Local 6 electrical. Guys could retire at 55, or 65. At 65 they got more money. You stll had to put 25 years in both plans. The union liked the 65 year old plan. Why? Because the retirees would only collect a handful of retirement checks before dying. They told retirees they would cover 100% of health care costs at 65 knowing these guys wern't going to see 65. Local 6 union is one of the better unions in the USA too.
In the U.S. at the beginning of the 19th century some 70 percent of the labor force worked on the farm. Today 3 percent not only feeds the population but also produces a large surplus for export.
Large companies were moving to hotel seating and 150% occupancy buildings encouraging folks to work from home a few days a week before the pandemic. The pandemic proved efficiency doesn’t decline with work from home. In a few years once the emotions have cleared accounting will point out to the board how expensive the way the world was built. Why pay for a chair in a rented building and provide air conditioning and janitorial services? Employees already have a home and they clean their own home and pay for their own air conditioner. The boards will agree. “The way things used to be” and “building culture” and whatever other bs people use to justify will matter not at all when profit margins can be juiced a percent.
I highly recommend viewing this short Louis Rossman video on the real reason why employees are not returning to work. This is from a small business owner in expensive NYC.
TL;DR - employers left the employees first. The first time economic uncertainty hit their business, they dropped as many people as possible. This led employees to reconsider their relationships to their employers and work, especially realizing they couldn't rely on a steady paycheck.
I went to a "progressive" school where we had one strange class called
"Design For Living". Today we'd probably call it "lifehacking". Among
the fascinating and odd topics was a lesson on managing free time.
The premise was a (socialist?) vision that everything would be done by
robots by 2000, and we would have to find good hobbies and interests,
keep fit and volunteer doing good things for our communities.
I think digital technology did the opposite in many ways. It turned us
into robots.
Another thing I noted while reading the article is it mentions trades
as the best sort of work. If you're a plumber, bricklayer, or
electrician then every job has an end. A wall is finished when you lay
the last brick.
By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps
changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more
revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to
enslave ourselves to.
Like that page that said "You have reached the end of the Internet", I
sometimes wonder if Microsoft might one day release "Windows Final
Edition" , the operating system that is finished.
Go home developers. Your work is complete. Well done!
Nicely written, but I don't fully understand your logic here. The bricklayer's wall in your comparison is precisely analogous to an "update" a developer has to do. The work is not complete for a bricklayer nor a software developer. Just as there is "one more revision or update" as you put it, there is always one more house to build walls for.
What I think you may be feeling though, is that working on software sometimes feels "endless", but that's really what happens when a project is poorly managed and no "strategic milestones" are reached. This is particularly severe in web dev, less so in the game dev scene where there are more of those "definite walls" to reach.
There's a satisfaction you get when you finish a house - there is something you can point to and say "that is done". There's even a satisfaction with mopping a floor, it is clean now even though it will dirty again.
Most programming doesn't have the first and only sometimes do you get the second. It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever. Programming is like being a contractor building the Winchester mansion.
As sibling comment implies, constructing things physically can often have the "forever needing to be built upon" aspect just like software.
The difference that you are probably feeling here, at least from what i can see, is that once a house is built by a construction company, it is "handed over" pretty much completely, whereas with software there is almost never such a handover, but instead a "support period". This I suppose can lead to fatigue as you end up never reaching a "final final" product per se like the house.
Personally, i have always found it helpful to plan by milestones/major versions, such that it, in a "hack the human brain" kind of way, provides a synthetic almost-copy of that " ah, all done, time to move on" that the human brain gets when a house is built, or a mountain is climbed.
Interesting philosophies hidden within all this, particularly for team leads and such of dev teams.
waterfall, well definied requirements, release every few months, have regression tests. have a few days to celebrate the release.
sure, business needs and software/IT complexity explosion means that only a small fraction of the problem-design space gets properly covered pushed the majority of the industry toward more agility
All the tradesmen I've talked with say get up or out as soon as you can. Many aspire to be inspectors or managers. A few do it when retired, out of boredom, though they don't seem to do as good a job and work at their own pace.
Bucky Fuller calculated that we should all be able to retire after a career of about two years having paid for the rest of our lives, by sometime in the 1970's if we apply our resources and technology efficiently. It was part of his "Design Science Revolution".
The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up.
At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet!
- - - -
Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?)
Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.
By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to.
You're talking about telic (finite) vs atelic (infinite) activities. Life needs a balance in the matrix of [painful/pleasurable + telic/atelic].
Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work.
I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favorite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Plus if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
Those are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. Sorry for the late
reply which I hope you see.
> Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is
where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that
way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of
atelic work.
You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making
music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all
without telos, other than as ends in themselves.
However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a
failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear
misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer
scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the
work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job
that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life.
Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to
set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away
from.
> I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects
and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them.
Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative
drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is
not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One
needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable
discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag
you.
> if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it
creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is
motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what
I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with
workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness
of so much activity.
I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of
technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction
between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a
normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for
its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle.
I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its
own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress
in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a
disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.
So you are saying you think the grass is greener over there?
I've worked lots in both, and it really is not. There's something satisfying about the physical movements, and being in different locations, about the house building work, but that is very different to the issue of completion of work you mentioned and I guess you just never did more than one physical building job?
Many people do that at work, because for most white collar professions it's simply impossible to stay productive the full length of the day one is expected to "work" (traditionally spend at an office).
I think some of that is not 'free' but 'recharge' time. If you're so exhausted that all you can do is stare at a screen then you're not doing what you really want.
I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here.
If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour?
Just do whatever you like!
I suspect a big problem is that many people actually don't know what they like to do. Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. (If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem)
Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix.
This is definitely a factor. It isn't just work: Maybe you 'only' work 40 hours a week. So does your spouse, though, and the children still need things as well. Housework still needs done, and someone has to produce food daily. It doesn't leave much time at all.
The other factor is money: If you have little to no money leftover to do anything, you aren't going to do it. Netflix and youtube are fairly low cost entertainment and can get you through a month, not to mention that they provide some sort of entertainment while you are doing other things much like radios used to. Housework is better when you are entertained.
> If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like!
It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be the political elite or the entrepreneurs or should it be inherited or or should it be the the people from special blood or religion or should no one be bourgeoisie and everyone should be working but you can't really argue over the resources and work done that is need to sustain a society.
You simply cannot have all the population on planet Earth retire on their savings because you cannot eat the numbers on the screen. With automation, robotics and other technologies we can increase the productivity and as a result we can afford to have greater percentage of people in leisure but we are nowhere near total machine labor. In fact, the percentage of non-working people probably is not that different than the past because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.
In dominant countries you might have the percentage higher and live off on imports from countries where everyone works much harder but the gap evaporates as these countries catch up.
So, the trick is to be part of a society that is so much advanced than the rest that their produce can buy off the produce of the society that relies on hard work. You can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas but this scheme falls apart when Hondurans start making their own apps and now you need to grow your own bananas.
I think the topic is quite nebulous but I recall some articles on these issues here on HN that reached the front page. I recall something about historical ratio of the non-working elites being about the same and societies crumbling over that threshold.
I am downvoting because the comment acts as if it's a mystery where all the wealth gains in productivity have gone.
It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.)
It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population.
>The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.
Citations required
I do not agree whatsoever, just because you don't have the imagination to come up with a better system for organizing labor and resources doesn't mean it isn't possible
How would you organize labor and resources such that there is no elite class? How do you enforce whatever rules are required and ensure that those enforcers don't become the elite themselves (if nobody else..)?
I'm not holding my breath. As of yet, no one has had the imagination. This has become a fav piece of rhetoric by ancoms who believe complex supply lines, infrastructure and essential services could be maintained, let alone improved upon, with a "flat hierarchy" society doing away with representative democracy. No one can take that seriously. The universe hates a vacuum and you can be sure that, as in the past, if goons have an opening to seize power under the guise of Communism, with their party being the only legitimate, then they will. Removing checks and balances will do that.
Citations aren't required, a basic knowledge of history, though, that is required and what you lack.
The idea, your idea is that there's a way to tell everybody what to do to make all the things work and everyone will follow the plan and like their spot in it. You lack the imagination to recognize individual will let alone the fact that society works because there are millions of experts making choices everyday. No central planning board to 'organize' 'labor' can accomplish that or house the knowledge of these individuals
So what, giving up so easily on problem so obvious is usually done by people who are well off and actually have to lose, or those who for some basic reason don't understand they are also the ones getting fucked over (ie patriotism can push folks easily in very stupid positions and in the same time make them feel good about their actions).
If you traveled a bit around the world, maybe you could see that nothing is binary, and neither is this topic.
Elites always exist in some form, yes. They do not always have to be so disproportionally distanced from rest of population like in US, not in democracies, not so untouchable. There are tons of countries, ie in Europe who are managing this in much better way.
The wider problem/situation I see is that US is much more everybody-for-themselves-and-fuck-the-rest because it maximizes direct incomes of few (ignoring how much they will spend on ie healthcare or education of their kids, these 2 can easily wipe out aby gains for middle/upper middle class), rather than living in actual modern society.
The logic of 'contributing back and improving place you live actually comes back to you too and creates something better for future of you/your kids' somehow didn't click in US that much. I saw first hand rather primitive knee-jerk reactions in ie bible belt in US that equate well working society with socialism, (I guess phonetical step not too big, logical though much bigger) and well that's communism and you should be deported/jailed/shot on spot.
Its evidenced by many comments here. People are well off and the system has worked for them so we see the attitude of "it's working for me, fuck everyone else who didn't work the way I did or wasn't born into the right circumstances"
People that have never been outside of the US think they are living rough. They also like to compare their living with only the most egalitarian societies in the world instead of 'the world'. Odds are pretty great that you live in comfort everyday. Your concerns then get to be centered around all the material things you lack. And, odds are great you've never had to sacrifice much of anything. Nothing real. You would never commit to working in a place you didn't want to go or taking a bad schedule because you, right now, want everything. You deserve it, don't you.
That's the attitude that, unfortunately, will also be found in America.
So, for those that have worked, have sacrificed, we aren't interested in hearing the solutions posed from a homogenous society of one distinct culture and obvious problems with irregularities or deviations from the norm.... Here's looking at you Nords
The problem isn't that wealthy people exist, the problem is what percentage they get. It makes a big difference whether the top 1% own 10% of the wealth or 50% of the wealth, for example.
That could fix a lot of issues if you just look at America in isolation. The truth is though, even with the insane wealth distribution in America, the middle class here still makes a good amount of money. I regularly see people on here scoff at low six figure salaries. Those salaries are virtually impossible in many parts of the world and the only reason they're so easy in America is because we are exploiting developing nations the same way the ultra wealthy here are exploiting us. If we actually tried to redistribute the wealth that the ultra wealthy has accumulated, it would go to developing nations and not the hackernews crowd.
> because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.
The retirees in your example, with great probability, either have to rely on outside support (be it children or social security), or they will die with lots of wealth left over (aka inheritance). I hate to sound like a crummy communist, but this is a distribution problem, first and foremost.
Unfortunately that's true. There are also many other models to have elites, some more fair or less cruel than others.
This way or another the main equation never changes. That is, the resources we consume are below the resources we produce. Left or right, communists or capitalist or other kind of ideologues are just different groups of people who have different ideas on how to distribute the roles.
US foreign policy and actions of private companies have absolutely decimated other countries, cultures, and economies so now those countries are reliant on the income from rich US capitalists exploiting their populace's dire straights. That we placed them in.
Part of the problem is that people have been conditioned into accepting this weird binary division between Work (measurable, institutionalized, subordinate labor) and Not-Work (everything else) that doesn't exist in healthy societies.
The kibbutzniks worked a lot harder than U.S. office workers, but didn't have the problem of alienation and the epidemic of mental ill-health (plus chronic inflammation, obesity, et al) that we have.
Almost all of us want the institutional, authoritarian nightmare we call "Work" to die, and it's past high time that it does... but, unfortunately, we've been stripped of our imagination when it comes to the question of how work (that is, useful activity) will get done without it.
We work more in large part because we consume much more. Increased consumption requires increased supply which requires increased production which means more work to be done.
Shelter costs have also increased massively, not only because shelter has gotten better but because there’s more room in people’s budget for landlords to capture.
Medical and educational costs have risen in the US, I would argue for the same reason.
And some adversarial work has expanded for no reason- look at all the effort spent in high frequency trading that could be replaced by venues running auctions every 100ms instead of having competitions for fractions of a microsecond.
If your boss is gonna take as much labor out of you as possible, no matter how productive you are, and no matter what advances in production methods you have achieved, productivity doesn't matter so much.
I live in Australia. Australia produces 190% of the food it requires, exports 71% of its agricultural production, and only 2.2% of its population work in agriculture. In earlier societies around 60% or more of the population worked in agriculture.
I don't believe most of this increasing agricultural productivity is due to us buying things from poor countries, although it's probably a factor at some level. I think it's due to the increasing technological sophistication of farming: the breeding of more productive crops, the use of tractors, the use of fertiliser both synthetic and man-made, better understanding and monitoring of soil health, better storage and better supply chains, new weedkillers, automated and partially automated animal handling, refrigeration and freezers, and everything else.
I do understand that someone has to do some work, but if we could have 8.8% of our population work in agriculture for 10 hours a week and not have to compete for housing against 40 hours a week incomes[0], that would be pretty great.
[0] Numbers are wrong: farmers work more than 40 hours a week. I think they explain the general point well enough, though.
People need more than food. Healthcare, education, electricity, water, the fancy phone or computer you’re reading this on, the infrastructure that connects it together with everyone else - all of these require people working in order to exist.
Food is just part of the human consumption. Starting with the agrarian society, we as species are having it very easy TBH. Disasters happen and some places are chronically problematic but overall food is solved problem since many millenniums.
Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.
I don't buy the argument that people living in Australia would starve to death if everyone in the world gradually halved their working hours over the next decade. I think current consumption here is so far above subsistence levels that there's a lot of room to drop without facing famine.
This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?
If halved working hours result in reduced output of the needed chemicals and machinery, that would definitely mean that less food will be produced. If Australia can keep up paying more than the rest and purchase the needed resources and machinery, then other parts of the world will starve and Australia will be just fine, I guess.
Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.
> Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.
And you'd have to assume nobody would change jobs. It's a useless extrapolation.
- the world is at literal subsistence level overall
- all nominal gains in productivity are just shuffling numbers around
- if anyone at all stops working, people will die
This seems obviously untrue given the increase in agricultural productivity. I know a few farmers, and none of them think agricultural productivity has stayed the same. Additionally, it seems really obvious that lots of industrial production is now going towards making luxury cars, TVs, smartphones, bigger houses, better healthcare, etc. and that not all of these are necessary for agricultural production.
Even further, global food insecurity has been decreasing. Only 8.9% of the world's population are food insecure, and prior to the war in Ukraine, those people mostly didn't live in agriculturally productive areas. I find it hard to believe that the remaining 91% are living off the work of the 8.9%. I think a much simpler explanation is that agriculture has actually gotten more productive even if you include the cost of making tractors.
On this topic, a question I've had for a while but never learned the answer to is: if nobody did anything outside farming, how expensive would farm equipment be?
I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.
Part of it is that there's a certain amount of food each person can reasonably eat - so if you want to feed a hundred people you can have, say, five or so with modern equipment farm the field and feed all 100, or you could have all 100 work with more outdated equipment (think: horses, etc) and farm the same amount.
I think I’m asking a different question: if we could actually work much less? Can we really feed people if everyone who isn’t currently a farmer or making farm equipment/consumables stopped working, or are greater economies of scale needed to keep the cost of that farm equipment and those consumables low?
Large swaths of people do work that is not even remotely related to farming, even if you need Google and AT&T for the companies that make the supplies farmers need, there's no arguable way the entertainment industry as a whole is necessary for farming or farming equipment. And I daresay there are others.
But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get.
Same for petrochemicals, steel.
I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.
> despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before
Don’t forget "rising living standards" which in Western cultures is an euphemism for "extravagant consumption".
> It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be (...)
How about we don't succumb to the desire to pull strawmen and focus on simple things to accomplish such as being able to make a honest living that leaves you with disposable income after covering all your cost of living with a simple 9-to-5 job?
Where does this need to create the illusion that there is possibly no grey area between a homeless slacker and a glorious millionaire investor?
Is it too much to ask the most prosperous economy in the history of the world to allow workers to actually live a modest life with your salary? Otherwise, why would those workers continue to support that absurd society?
> If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem
When I was younger, I multiple times tried to cut of all mindless crap like tv or browsing. It led to lite depression and low productivity every single time. Conversely, when I had a lot of free time or worked on easy boring project, the stuff I do in free time became more intellectually difficult without me intentionally going for it.
My point here is that people cant be productive all the time. We do need some amount of mindless chill, be it tv or low key socialization.
For sure. Ever tried to go to bed immediately after sending the last email, your mind still preoccupied by work? It's impossible to get a good sleep like that. At least for me.
A hour or two of unwinding with a book or a Star Trek episode, talking about vacation with your SO or something else to get your mind off work is essential.
Which makes excessive work even more problematic. You have to commute, shop, do chores AND unwind.
Yeah but that's not even contended. In a hypothetical scenario where you didn't have to work to earn a certain quality of life (since, lets be honest, none of us have to "work to live"), would it be ideal to spend all of that time on passive, consumptive activities? Notwithstanding issues with life balance that are not endemic, I think work is good for people in most of its capacity. Coordinating with others and producing something of your labors, particularly that which others value, is validating and meaningful. You could quibble that some of that could be done at leisure, but things we take for granted won't. There's a lot of well compensated hard work out there that no one does for fun.
Leaving aside the question of the merit of work, I think a consistently low-productivity lifestyle leads to negative symptoms.
In that hypothetical scenario, it is likely that I would not ended up spending all of that time on passive, consumptive activities. Assuming that there would be options for me to be more active and it would be socially acceptable for me to do things.
(If I lived in suburbs where HOA makes it impossible to have garden, I might end up purely passive and depressed simply due to no activity being possible.)
The corporate work week was never going to go below 35-40 hours per week. Bosses know they only get 15 good hours out of most people, if that, and it doesn't bother them as much as you'd think it would, because they get enough. It's not about productivity; it's about control. The workweek has to comprise at least 50.1% of a typical person's otherwise discretionary time, because otherwise people could have two jobs and the employer's power would be reduced.
This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.
I do realize that, at least if we're talking about middle managers. It'd be a stretch to say that executives are "labor"
or are "employees" except in a strict legal fashion. Executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The reasons for this are sociological rather than economic--in short, so long as executives uphold the interests of the upper class, the other rich people who control the company (important shareholders) will look the other way on their self-dealing.
The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.
Nah. Activist shareholders don't look the other way. If they see a profit opportunity then they won't hesitate to execute a leveraged buyout and sack all the senior executives. This has happened many, many times. When it comes to making money, any notion of class loyalty died in the 1980's.
It seems that there is a lot of emotion in your assessment because you use sweeping absolutes to describe millions of people. In my experience the world is complex and nuanced. Do you really mean to say all rich people are law breakers ala crooks? When you define rich, are you using a global scale? For instance are most people in the developed world crooks? There are good and bad people in all walks of life, all countries, races, etc. More often than not, when you get to understand the forces that impact people, you realize that what seem like simple decisions from the outside to make the world a better place have unseen negative consequences.
On a personal level, I can say my managers try to be good people, although the may not always do the best thing. In my case, my wife has stage 4 cancer and they have been tremendously supportive.
Edit: I should probably mention for full transparency I work at Amazon as it is sited in the article.
It's a more inclusive version of the company store where one does work for tokens while it's near impractical to be self sufficient & difficult/dangerous to be physically soverign. Even if one lives off the land, the corporations & government groups have polluted & own most of it. One would have to go fully indigenous to move away from the system, but even then there is much violence against the indigenous peoples.
Some solutions include gaining leverage over existing systems of control (e.g. management), cooperation with like minded people to form a group for protection (like a prison gang), carving out domains of autonomy from systems of control, or just stop feeding the more oppressive patterns in all aspects of life
It was never practical to be self sufficient. Hunter gatherers living off the land worked together in tribes. People alone in the wilderness mostly die.
Sure...I never stated that self-sufficiency meant being alone. Hunter Gathers also had a relatively flat social hierarchy that was family & tribe oriented. The elders & leaders had direct skin in the game. There was no middle management or social abstractions in Hunter Gatherer society. They were healthy, happy, had plenty of game to hunt, managed forests, & had little pollution. There was no large scale wars. They were self sufficient as a community. Now we have multi level hierarchical control systems where the people benefiting have no direct downside to causing harm to other people.
This sort of over-the-top flamewar comment is off topic on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
We've had to ask you before not to post like this. If you keep it up, we're going to have to ban you—not because we disagree with your views (we don't know or care what those are) but because we don't want this place to burn to a crisp.
So you respond by being hyperbolic...If you want to ban me, go ahead. I have no intention in creating a "flamewar". I'm not sure what exactly I'm "destroying" here so go ahead & do whatever you see fit...As far as I'm concerned, I made a statement of truth with historical analogy. Is history now verboten as an "over-the-top flamewar"? You have proven my point of group coercion & why it is dangerous for individuals to subjugate themselves to the group or "management".
FYI 'house negroe' was a rare occurrence in the Antebellum South. Majority of plantations weren't big enough to support distinct labor pools, slaves largely and for the most part rotated tasks depending on age, gender, season, etc (the gender aspect is also why 'house negroe' is meant to suggest an effeminized Black male, which is an entirely other problematic discussion). Never mind the much higher rate of sexual assault and abuse when in close proximity to slaveowners. The political distinction this dubious dichotomy is meant to imply (Black folk loyal to slave owners, as suffering Stockholm Syndrome) is largely an effect fabricated in Malcolm X's 1963 speech given at Michigan State University and has persisted via constant repetition in popular culture.
Distinct labor pools were much more at hand in places like Jamaica where the average plantation was much larger than in the American south.
This is a similar distortion to the way people use 'Uncle Tom' when, ironically enough, the actual literary character is the opposite of the political distinction implied by pejorative use
Except we're talking about the genealogy of the perjorative use of the term which runs contrary to the book which is anti-slavery fiction wherein the eponymous character dies protecting runaway slaves.
It's anti-slavery fiction in which the passivity and forbearance of the titular character was not to everyone's taste, among many other things. You think, I dunno, Baldwin was 'distorting' Uncle Tom's cabin? It's a weird way to put it.
As I’ve gotten older, I have been vocalizing a question to my friends and family: why is it so unreasonable of me to not want to work a job I don’t like, and instead spend my time producing documentaries and teaching audio production to kids? These are two things I’ve found I love doing. They provide value to society. Yet a sustained income from them is basically unattainable except in very specific, lucky cases, not to mention the income is minimal.
People love to consume art but don’t value the arts. People love the idea of kids - especially “at risk youth” - having technical or otherwise just interesting programming, yet in the case of audio production like I mentioned above there is just one nonprofit here busting its ass trying to make it happen as the only entity attempting it.
All of this is to say, if I didn’t have to worry about making a living and had a bunch of leisure time, I would be putting my time and energy towards these endeavors. Because I think they are valuable, they mean something to me, and I think society would benefit from it too. Unfortunately we have this ridiculous habit of tying morality to work in the US as a result of our Puritan hangover, which means I am not able to pursue the above unless someone deems it worthy of sustained funding (they won’t because virtually no ROI on documentaries or ethical kids programs) or I am sitting on a nest egg most people can’t ever achieve so I don’t have to worry about surviving.
Sorry for the semi-rant. The negative ripple effect tying work to morality has on our society is truly hard to overstate and it upsets me a lot. It’s such a cynical view of people and, unfortunately, is often tied to racial perceptions as well.
Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?
I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is producing, so it's generally assumed that someone with a full time job produces enough to cover their needs while the unemployed surviving off of welfare do not.
We even make allowances for people trying to reach net positive production. Students, for example, aren't typically looked down upon. It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.
> Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?
This is how we end up with no art, no music, no culture, no raising of the future generations etc. If the only metric via which we value time spent and effort spent is money earned none of these (very important) things can compare even to the most useless widget making / admin job.
Plenty of people pay for art and music. I didn't say they weren't valuable, I said what you're trying to offer specifically may not be valuable. I know you think it's some incredible service that everybody wants, but have you considered that maybe it isn't?
That's not relevant to the discussion, if you have something you want to say then just say it. Don't try to ask me a question you think you know the answer to and then tell me my answer precludes me from having an opinion on the subject at hand.
This is one of the most common methods I see employed by bad-faith conversationalist and it's sickening. Your point should stand on it's own merit, not on your ability to invalidate the "oppositions" side.
That makes no sense. People do pay for those things. They buy art and concert tickets. Teaching isn't super lucrative but they earn a decent living wage in most areas.
>but they earn a decent living wage in most areas.
Debatable and only part of the problem. Education is a terrible example for you to bring up, as evidenced by the absurdly low salaries they receive combined with the broad expectations of their job (therapy, education, tutoring, crisis intervention, nutrition, baby sitting, special needs identification, the list goes on).
Have you seen the turnover rates in education? It’s in an appalling state. No resources, garbage pay, and now they’re being asked to shoot back at school shooters as their schools are redesigned to look like prisons, all while politicians play tug of war with their curriculum as a proxy battle for social policies.
The sad fact is we don’t value educators in the US. Hell we don’t value caregivers much either.
>Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?
Is producing cigarettes, making apps more addictives, making food superpalatable, synthetizing pernicious drugs and so on more valuable than producing documentaries, studying ancient languages and civilazations, studying exoterical physics topics?
Not everything that we're paying for is valuable and not everything valuable is being paid for.
I guess that depends on how you define value. Tobacco, while unhealthy, can have great value to the user. Those addictive apps provide a low cost leisure activity for millions of people. We all benefit from advances in food sciences every day. Many of those pernicious have a purpose and are often more helpful than they are harmful.
All the things you mentioned provide at least short term tangible benefits to the consumers. How will the average person benefit from the study of ancient languages and civilizations or esoteric physics? People already pay for documentaries they're interested in, there's a reason they're produced. Why do you think academia for academia's sake is inherently beneficial for the rest of society? I see this notion of expressed here and elsewhere that if something is academically challenging or interesting, it must therefore be good to spend time studying.
> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.
Your view is manifestly incorrect. There are so many groups of people that are looked down upon, what you describe is just a tiny tiny subset of these. If you are grasping to find an example, that shows a great deal about your position in life.
(If you still struggling, start with sex workers, people working in waste management, and people with physical disabilities, aka 'hookers' and 'trash people' and 'cripples'. Yeah, they definitely not looked down upon. LOL. I could literally write 10 pages of further examples.)
I obviously wasn't saying the only prejudice in the world exists against lazy people and that no other group of people were ever looked down upon. You've got to use context clues before getting all fired up like this. The was in response to how we purportedly "tie work to morality". It was obviously meant as something closer to:
> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon *for not working a typically job.*, and rightfully so
Really you should try to avoid taking things intentionally out of context and getting yourself worked up over, it's not healthy.
Do you think the measure of worth in society is how much people are willing to pay for it? Is that the metric by which we should judge all contributions to society?
Also, do you think documentaries are valuable? Because the vast majority do not have investors and do not make much money. Frankly without grants we’d barely have any.
I program for work, and not leisure. As prospective careers go, it probably ranks top among similar labor. All the same I could not be arsed to develop "for its own sake". Work offers coordinating with others towards a common goal and finding validation from the product, and the value it brings - but it also, it offers incentive.
If people don't "have" to do anything, they generally don't do much. Especially today where attention is easily hijacked by passive electronic consumption, advertisers. This leads to problems. Low motivation, ennui, health issues. It's not a question of "discovering what one likes to do".
>I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here.
There is a strong incentive to craft a narrative where their present lifestyle (live in a filthy city, busy all the time, etc) is, if not the best possible, at least unavoidable.
Its like the joke of the businessman who sees a fisherman doing nothing on the beach.
Why dont you go fish some more?
Why would i?
Then you can make more money, buy another boat and make even more money.
But why?
Then you can build a fleet and with even more money you can control the factories where your fish is processed.
And then?
Well then with your empire you can spend two weeks of the year on the beach, like me.
Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?
Looking at the people I know there is a huge overlap between free time and happiness. Unemployment is stressful, but looking at the extremes comfortable retirement easily beats constant overwork. And voluntarily working part time beats a full time job as long as their income is sufficient.
It’s only when you compare full retirement vs part time work that there is something of an aberration. But, that tends to be a self selecting population.
> Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person.
As an anecdote to the contrary, I've just exited a half-year period of unemployment during which I spent a lot of time on hobbies, started eating much better, had nearly no stress in life, and built up a steady exercise routine. I met a lot of people from around the world and learned about them and the places they came from. I'd casually go on bike rides wherever and whenever I wanted and my absolute priority was my own well-being. Now I'm like a completely different person: stronger, more confident, healthier, and more appreciative and aware of the things in life that bring me joy.
I probably dragged out that stage of my life longer than I needed to or should have, because it was just so liberating. It felt like I was doing right by my body and soul for the first time in my life. Were it not for my slowly dwindling savings, I might have stayed even longer living like that. And that's the case of doing zero work. In a society with an emphasis on leisure you'd more likely be looking at work with flexible/reduced hours or extended vacations.
That assumes that people left to their own free will and time would end up in a dismal state as the default. I’m not sure.
I’d love to see a proper analysis but there’s lots of evidence both ways. Some people with excess leisure would end up doing nothing. Some would work on hobbies. Some would start businesses or maybe participate in local government or something.
It might also be that, given enough time in a leisure society, people would adapt for better or worse.
> "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40.
This is categorically untrue for much (I'd hazard to say most) of the population. It's certainly untrue for me. I don't like feeling full, and I don't really gain weight when I eat whatever I want.
Security against adversity, delayed gratification for better future reward, leaving a legacy or your kids, or philanthropy... there are lots of reasons not to live by our animal instincts of the bare minimum of how much work is enough for "survival".
One emergent process of the technological age is the drive to optimize ourselves (humans) as if we are machines for increased productivity. Think of all the ways we measure aspects of our behavior, goals, accomplishments.
American society often anchors identity in work (“Nice to meet you. What do you do?”). An example search result for “work and American identity” turned up this survey from 2014: 55% of Americans get a sense of identity from their job.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...
I think it's also very easy to just look around at all the problems and mysteries in the world/universe and feel compelled to do something. Even in the absence of any kind of "religious work ethic".
>> Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday
I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write.
As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do.
Or as Bukowski wrote:
"if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you're going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you're on
welfare,
you're going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you're going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you're going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment,
flood and fire."
In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.
As a few other commenters pointed out, the perspective of many on the idea of leisure time is that it will lead to one’s destruction. This is an incredibly damaging and blind perspective on the struggles of the working class. There is no leisure time when you work a poor paying physically and emotionally demanding job and spend the other hours of the day preparing for said job (house work, eating, commuting). Work will set you free but wage slavery binds you. There is also a learned helplessness that comes with this soul crushing routine that turns you against your fellow worker and pushes them to comply with a system that only breaks you. For some, this learned helplessness is the only way to cope with the reality that your life is to serve the same 5 oligarchs that rule.
>Indeed, in 2006, the top twenty per cent of earners were twice as likely to work more than fifty hours a week than the bottom twenty per cent, a reversal of historic conditions.
>Just why this has happened is both a mystery and a paradox.
No paradox. One way to make more money is to work more.
It's really a lot more than this. Top earners (which is a narrower group than a full quintile, but just bear with me) are producing huge value for their fellow man, which is certainly more interesting than hourly work and can be addicting or at least very satisfying. There are also huge incentives to overwork yourself if you're specialized and very knowledgeable, because the coordination costs of finding someone else capable of sharing the load and then doing all the delegating, meeting, review, etc. can be extreme. If you're working for yourself on some earlier stage ventures, it may take you 35 hours of work just to keep the business running; in that case working 50 hours vs. 40 triples your 'productive' time. And on and on.
>One way to make more money is to work more.
In these discussions it's worth remembering the second order effects of hours worked on pay. The first order effect is that an hourly rate multiplied by more hours is a higher number. But if you're hourly, working long hours puts more of your time in overtime in any official hourly sort of situation. More importantly, it means that you're getting good at your job at an uncommonly high rate, and you're the person who's always around, who knows more and is getting things done. It's hard to promote someone else in this scenario. And for the person working, it's hard to not quickly outgrow the job in this way.
Finally, an analogy: my brother spends way more of his time playing basketball than I do. It's not that I can get all the basketball I need done in 20 minutes a week whereas it takes him 5 hours. I just suck at basketball, so I don't care to play.
Not if you can't get schedules for more hours which is the situation millions of people are in also a lot of people can't pay others to do their chores and such for them so they have to do that themselves which can take a lot of time.
I have several fantastic things that I love doing and work makes it very hard for me to pursue them.
One of them is philosophy. There is a great deal of benefit and pleasure that a person can derive from learning about about and understanding the arguments that have been made across the centuries.
Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk.
Another are video games that stimulate your brain in an amazing way. Another is spending time close to nature. Another is talking and listening to people.
When I come across a person that tells me "But what would you do if you had more free time?", I realize it's like this because people can't imagine a different world. They don't know how to live freely. So they willfully fight to maintain this broken world, insisting that it's the only way.
So I do my work, try to get it done as fast as possible. I earn a lot, but my work makes no difference to anyone's life. If I could get 1/10 of what I earn but without having to perform all this theatre, it would be better for everyone.
Not really, no company hires you for 10 or 20% in software engineering, while still paying enough that you could sustain yourself. The minimum is 80%, because it still the most of your time, so it seems reasonable in the work oriented society.
Im a bit skeptical that the poster would actually be happy with 10% pay, which would probably not cover the insurance, shelter, and food they are used to.
That said, I am open minded and there are certainly people that do live on 10% of a SWE salary. You can rent a mobile home in a low CoL area, get on Medicaid, and have a lot of free time. Some people do exactly this, but it is a pretty rare breed.
I'd absolutely accept 10% pay for a four hour schedule, but I have been working for a long time and have built up enough investments to live on that and gains. It's nearly early retirement. I don't think I'd do it if I was young, though.
You can definitely get contracting gigs (Upwork at the bottom tier) or consulting work to work only 10-20% hours. Depending on your skill set you might find it easier to do “blocks” of 20-hour weeks to align with client needs, then take blocks of time off.
It’s doable, but not on a standard employment contract.
Thanks, this is constructive and useful! I have no idea how to look into that, but if I manage to land something like that, I could reduce my working week.
No idea how to deal with the uncertainty of being able to get enough contracts that pay enough.
> One of them is philosophy. There is a great deal of benefit and pleasure that a person can derive from learning about about and understanding the arguments that have been made across the centuries.
Do you just enjoy reading about it and that's it? Or how do you make philisophy interactive and interesting beyond satisfying curiousites? I got kind of into some sub topics of philosophy, but lost a lot of motivation once i realized no one cares about what you have to say or even really wants to cater to you unless your part of academia
I'm learning about the history of ideas and the arguments used to defend or challenge them. Reading philosophical texts is the way to do that.
Understanding such a text often is an interactive experience - you formulate your own claims and try to relate then to the argument that the text contains. It's challenging but very satisfying.
Nevertheless, it helps to have teachers - joining courses lead by people who learned philosophy in academia is a common way to find them. YMMV, and it depends on what's available to you locally.
I can see how it can differ for everyone. For some people, there's value in just learning about new things and not necessarily "exercising" that skill in a community or making a dent in the culture. Think of it like learning to paint or make music, but not necessarily wanting to impacting the art world or becoming a performer.
Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I hate the performative theater of office life. Pretending to care, pretending that our work matters at all. But the pay is great, and I can’t afford to live without it, so… that’s how it goes.
>> One of them is philosophy. There is a great deal of benefit and pleasure that a person can derive from learning about about and understanding the arguments that have been made across the centuries.
>> Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk
Maybe you should get a job doing repetitive manual labor. You get plenty of activity and it is completely mindless so you can be thinking about whatever you want. That's how it was for me at least.
You can do a single-income family and successfully, but you have to make some choices to do so. I know many who do it, and not all with no kids (some with many).
Things like older cars, smaller houses, location differences, etc. But there are major cost savings that offset, especially with the kids. Single car may work out, less gas, less tax, even less food expenses (many people faced with two incomes eat out more, and prepare food less).
Seeing people do is on $40k salaries means it should be entirely possible on larger ones. Note that if you want to try, it is almost always best for the lower earner to be the one who "stays home" so as to maximize income and minimize tax.
Also "not working a 9-5" is not synonymous with "no income" - there are actual non-scammy work that can be done at home in spare time if desired, and things like teaching exercise class, coaching, also exist.
Exactly those are the choices I'm willing to make. And I just see most even low-income people waste so, so, SO much money on the most stupid of things that I always think to myself man, with my spending habits it must be so easy to pull of.
Your last point is very good as well. I wouldn't want my wife to do nothing, just not slave off at some stupid corporate 9-5 job lessening her, mine and our children's quality of life. There are so many options for quality remote work these days.
It depends on the relationship you have with your spouse. A solid, long term relationship with trust makes this much easier.
We've done this for 17 years now on my salary which has been maybe a little over the national median for software engineers in that time. We live in a median-cost city. Since we are homeschooling, we have avoided communities with high property taxes (we pay 50% less than our neighbors in good school districts).
We've had two cars the entire time, although we'll let them age rather than trade them in for newer models. Our house is modest and we were actually able to pay off the mortgage years early. We max out my 401k and our IRA contributions.
We don't take fancy vacations, which is more of a personal preference rather than a cost cutting decision.
At this point everything is completely commingled financially and we just think of it as our money. Legally that's pretty much the way it is, if we were to get divorced (not going to happen) my wife would be entitled to half of everything (including my 401k). My sister was in a similar situation and I saw this happen in her divorce.
So there are safeguards for the non-working spouse. But still, if there isn't a high degree of trust and openness in the relationship it might not be a good idea. It has been great for our children.
I see your point, and form what I observe that often happens. I guess you gotta be able to accurately gauge whether she shares those same underlying values of not wanting to live lavishly with you or not, before you can even think about living together like that.
There is nothing “surely” about eventually being seen as a resource to be consumed.
Statistically, people in long-term committed relationships have more stable incomes, longer lives, and better outcomes than those who don’t [1]. The direction of causality is somewhat unclear, but that such a relationship exists at all is a fairly strong refutation of your claim.
Which isn’t to say that all of them work out or that it is always sunshine and rainbows. But there is nothing inevitable about the outcome you claim. It’s actually lower probability.
New houses have more than doubled in size since the 1950s while holding one less occupant on average.
Houses have a lot more amenities than they used to have, like AC and a clothes dryer instead of a clothes line.
We have torn down about a million SROs* since the 1950s and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle housing.
We are more car oriented than in the past and cars are typically the second largest expense in a household budget and they've gotten crazy expensive as well.
Having said that, I will recommend the (possibly out of print) book How to survive without a salary by Charles Long in support of your crazy plan. ;)
A reason not mentioned yet: people get divorced more often now than in the past. If you have relied on your partner's income for a decade, it can be really hard to get into the workforce on your own, with a ten-year sized hole in your resume and the professional experience of a 20-year old.
Heck, it can be difficult enough after a couple of extended parental leaves, much less half a marriage.
One of the big benefits for single-income households is the "homework" is not counted as wages even if it's definitely work - you have to earn more than the cost of daycare or the gardener to pay for them, for example.
Probably everyone here can make low six figures without trying. But many want to make 400k a year. So they are trying. I'm done with the rat race myself. Physically, I'm in better shape than almost all of the try hards at work.
Hot take: If you can follow the posts here, you can make 300k in the US
Check out the salaries on levels.fyi
And no, it is not reasonable to make 100k in the Midwest instead. Unless you're buying like $50,000 worth of gas and eggs per year, you're going to save WAY more in the SF Bay Area and reclaim years of your life by retiring earlier
There's bad spots, of course. But there are no shortage of pleasant places with dirt cheap housing, which is not the case in the bay area.
I've got a safe, friendly, walkable neighborhood, and my mortgage is 6 percent of my gross income. The bay area is not the only place where you can save a lot of money.
Where, may I ask? The Midwest is a huge place with affluent neighborhoods, but those generally aren’t walkable. I enjoyed living in downtown Toledo much more than I did Sylvania (a more affluent suburb next door).
Yeah, or you could buy and live in a crappy condo in the bay area, then sell it and buy a nice house in the Midwest 10 years sooner
There's definitely a tradeoff, but it's disingenuous to imply that it's a good financial move to take a 50% pay cut
That said, these last couple of years remote work has really taken off, so maybe you can have your nice house in the Midwest and retire early in it too
I’m not sure about that. It just seems like too easy an excuse. Just to damn convenient to say, “If only the rich people...”.
I fear that the reason that applies much more often is that most of our energy is being spent on doing the wrong things, or being spent on competition with others.
Think of somebody building a web scraper: They are spending hours or days building something whose purpose is essentially to overcome defenses created by other people. So it’s a Red Queen thing. Both parties have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
And I believe this is happening in many areas. Marketing. Government. Compliance. Software. You name it.
It’s what Hannah Arendt called work turning into labor. In other words, that which used to be the act of creating something once has turned into that which constantly needs to be repeated for the mere sake of subsistence.
The better question to ask, in my opinion, is not “Who is at fault for this?“, but “ How do I, personally, avoid wasting my own energy like that?“
Thank you. Now I better come up with a good answer, eh?
But I'm afraid I don't have a better answer than that it seems to be a constant struggle. As Feynman said, "The first rule is not to fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool". It's incredibly difficult to keep yourself on track. It's just so easy to work on bullshit.
Things that never cease to blow my mind in that regard:
- Asking yourself constantly, "What am I trying to achieve here?"
- Disengaging from the computer, going for a walk to lying down in the hammock. Often gives you ideas that you didn't see while you were in the "tunnel vision" of execution.
- If you're waiting for result of action A so you can do action B, try if you can't do action B even without action A completed. Often, you will notice that you actually can.
Also, being conscious of the distinction between "labor" and "work" in Hannah Arendt's sense is helpful:
She defines "labor" as anything that is a recurring drain on your time and energy, and necessary to your survival. So, in a sense, it's the equivalent to a business' overhead. Eating food, mowing the lawn - these are all things that you have to do over and over again just to keep "afloat". These are also the things which do not change the future. One month from now, it just won't make much of a difference whether you mowed your lawn today or not.
In contrast, "work" in Arendt's sense is anything where you create something that did not exist before. Something that has a value in and of itself. And which, once created, will continue to exist, and will continue to add value to the future, even if you did drop dead right now. Writing a piece of software that people use. Building a lawn mowing robot. And, not to forget, teaching your kids and being a good role model to them. These are all examples of "work".
This is not to say that, when demands of "work" and "labor" collide, you should always choose the work over the labor. But you should be conscious of the difference, and take that into account when you choose what activity is going to have the greatest value to you.
This is the "keeping yourself on track" part, and the "not wasting your energy on things that do not need to get done".
The other part is the Red Queen / arms race thing. And I think one thing that might be important and useful here is to try to avoid competition (duh!). Or, at least, to be very strategic about when to engage in competition and when not to. Picking your battles, so to speak, as opposed to fighting any battle that presents itself.
I mean, one way some people get out of the rat race is to let others compete against each other. Amazon is doing that with its marketplace sellers. So not allowing yourself to become an Amazon marketplace seller would probably be a good idea. There are always these areas that are "en vogue", where there's a community about it, podcasts about it, etc.. I tend to see those things as red flags. Because if there are people there already "selling shovels", you know that the space is over-crowded. Much better to go some place no one seems to be talking about. Or even a place which, if you talk about it, people will think you're an idiot.
In investing they say, "Buy on fear, sell on greed". The same, I think, applies to choosing where to "invest" your time and energy. Any place that people avoid, do not see, or even fear likely is a much better choice. Although, just as in investing, the price you pay for the freedom from competition is uncertainty, a lack of approval from others, and not being taken seriously. Though one can slowly learn to recognize these symptoms as a sign that the path you've chosen is a good one in terms of being free from hype and competition. That's not a guarantee that it will work out for you, of course. But you're at...
It's the power of money that demands that we turn our efforts -- and therefore, ourselves -- into commodities. When money becomes a force in and of itself (separate from the people wielding it) then it begins to mold society in its own image: cold, liquid, and homogenous. Competition isn't in and of itself a bad thing, but when we allow money complete control over our lives, we strive in ways that benefit people farther and farther removed from us, and therefore, become more alienated.
I agree. My own theory is that the benefits of higher productivity - that it was assumed would translate to more free time - have largely been captured by the financial sector by way of increased credit/debt servicing.
Alas, I work. I can hack it a bit by remote working and doing a 4 day work week. I have to give up playing and a studying/teaching for that.
I don’t understand how people can say that people need directions and therefore need to work. I need the exact opposite and I am sure I am not alone. I could imagine that some people need direction and therefore need to work. Not me though. I’d love to have all the free time in the world.
Older than 30, easily. You were wrong. Accept it, learn from it. Do your best to be more empirical next time or to speak more in a form of probability and by highlighting your assumptions. At least, if you want to make more accurate statements that are actually verifiably true. I think my approach outlined above would help.
If you don’t, then I don’t really see the point of your comment.
> The vast majority of the people who have too much to do are young.
One can always extend a helping hand into making society more safe, fun and better. Or at least die trying to do that. It doesn't matter how old I get, simply knowing that I can help certain people directly or do my best to advance some state of knowledge by the tiniest bit, in science or in a human being itself means to me that there's always something to do that I'd consider to be meaningful and/or even enjoyable.
Common right-wing propaganda is that socialism is a poverty cult. This is particularly prevelant in American culture. It's a complete fabrication. The reality is everyone should enjoy the fruits of their labours to a greater degree than they do today. This is the very idea behind workers owning the means of production.
Another way to put this is that every billionaire is a policy failure.
A quote that is often mentioned in this area is [1]:
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
I'm reminded of a scene from The Sting where Robert Redford and Paul Newman's character are debating whether someone they've decided to con will take the bait [2]:
> "We had him 10 years ago when he decided to be somebody."
All the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" in the US have so successfully been propagandized with that view so that Bezos can have $130B instead of $120B.
Americans should ahve more leisure time. They should have more satisfaction in life. And they should have a greater share in the properity they are fundamental in creating.
But none of that will happen until people realize that being divided on social issues is a tool used for manipulation. It's to stop working people from having class solidarity. You know who has class solidarity? Billionaires.
This isn't even a party issue. The billionaires have bought all sides.
Anyone who quotes the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" line has never met a working class person. Nobody thinks that. I worked in a plastic factory for ten years and it's very clear there is no path up from making $45k to anything higher than plant manager. People who are just feeding a grinding machine expect even less.
My feeling is that most of my coworkers felt somewhat exploited and envious, but they didn't buy into ideological propaganda. They just don't go socialist, either because they think it's hopeless, or because they want to distinguish themselves from the low-status welfare recipients just below them. It's more ideological people, like me, who absorb the propaganda and actually believe Jeff Bezos deserves it.
>distinguish themselves from the low-status welfare recipients
That's literally the same concept as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Its all class warfare and the distinction you make is useless in the grand scheme
This is rationally protecting what status you do have, not fooling yourself into believing you are much higher status than you appear. This is normal behavior you can see discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling. The embarrassed millionaires theory infantilizes working-class people with a false-consciousness argument that doesn't seem to understand that class warfare has gradations other than "rich" and "poor".
Distinguishing yourself as being in a separate class from someone else has nothing to do with preserving anything, that sounds like absolute nonsense to me. Its some classiest BS designed to keep the poor working class fighting each other
Among the things you preserve by making sure you are not mistaken for a lower social class are:
* whether people invite you to social events
* how people treat you when you ask for help
* what kind of sex partners you have access to
* your own perception of yourself as worthy and accomplished
It's not an economic class thing, it's a social class thing and would exist even if everyone had the exact same income.
Meanwhile reaching for millionaire status when you don't really have it is stressful. Other people will push you back down and you have to fake a lot of behaviors you don't really know how to use. So people generally accept their level instead of identifying with a higher class. This is true in theory and also when you actually talk to them.
There are a lot of people on this forum (and most Bay Area companies) born in communist hell holes such as USSR or China. Go talk to them before saying stupid things about socialism and the level of poverty it forces upon people.
And if you thing poverty is the worst thing about the Commies just remember that people are not allowed to leave Communist countries. Think about, people who don't like America or feel "oppressed" have _always_ been free to move to a country they liked better. In USSR and the European countries occupied by it, Cuba, North Korea people were shot and survivors imprisoned for trying.
Yep. The communist countries were more or less one big forced labor camp. You couldn't leave and, while living there, obviously had to work to survive. For the most part, private sector didn't exist, so you had to work in a government-owned company, which usually paid you just enough to survive. You were beaten, tortured or killed if you protested or tried to escape. Pretty much a XX century slavery.
>The antidote is simple to prescribe but hard to achieve: it is a return to the goal of efficiency in work—fulfilling whatever needs we have, as a society, with the minimal effort required, while leaving the option of more work as a hobby for those who happen to love it.
What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated.
It's my understanding that we prefer individualism and status. The housing market with reduced interests rates has shown that people don't take the opportunity to work less. Instead, they are willing to max out what they can spend per month.
Apart from individual status, don't we want leisure time to be as low as possible to have maximum progress [1]?
If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next?
[1] Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
> If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next?
No, I believe that he assumption that leisure time can't also be productive is fundamentally false. When given the opportunity to create what truly matters to people, I think we'd see some surprising results. Just look at open source, I hope to see a day that someone can dedicate the majority of their hours to open source work without having to majorly compromise their lifestyle if they so choose.
Right now, we create what those who own the capital believe to be important, there's no empirical evidence that the products I've personally worked on in my career, for example, make any meaningful effort to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Most of the software I've built probably won't be around in 20 years even, I'd be shocked if any of it is still around when I die.
> What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated.
We could experiment by making that available as a baseline - anyone who wants to can sleep in the flophouse, wear the durable clothes, eat the soup kitchen food.
And anyone who wants more could continue as they are.
Right now we theoretically have that, but in practice it's a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare to partake in social services, and once you fall of the Employment Train it's extremely hard to get back on unless you have connections or very valuable skills
I wonder what society would be like with a perfect safety net.. I'm kinda worried we'd end up with horrible ghettoes full of disgruntled people like the future in Judge Dredd, but I want to believe that society would adjust and we'd value connecting to other people, learning, and enriching ourselves
We've done it with certain services, we could do it for more - massive soup kitchens open to all for eating anytime, for example. By skipping the "money" part the desire for fraud drops, too.
I think we do have a lot of leisure time. Otherwise, how would things like hustle culture or the other “make money while not at work” movements be feasible? If you got a side project going then you have lots of leisure time, enough for an entire second job.
It seems obvious that we have no more leisure time now than before.
But consider the huge leisure industries that have grown over the past 100 years. Movies, TV, now streaming services. Radio and now Spotify and podcasts. Video games. Sports and all the media around sports. Even social media is arguably mostly entertainment these days.
Or look at active leisure. How many more cyclists and rock climbers are there today vs 100 years ago? Or skiers or runners or hikers?
Judging by the shape of the economy, there is a lot more leisure time than before. As a whole, Americans spend a lot less time growing food and making clothes and, well, surviving in general, and a lot more time doing the things above. But Americans also spend a lot more time making the things we fill our leisure time with.
A huge part of it is now everything's outsourced - dual income families are the norm now, and the housework still has to be done. That alone would count for a large amount of lost leisure.
You also have commutes going from walking to driving - and the first may feel leisurely but the second rarely does.
Can you expand on the slavery analogy? I'm aware that this is the naive perspective, but when I realized I was watching more TV than I liked, I stopped, and there was no overseer to whip, mutilate, or starve me into resuming.
That isn't to say that it's trivial: I had to identify why I was doing it (I don't even like watching TV!), and then work on myself so that I had the mental energy to replace it with activities I find rewarding, like reading in the park or playing music.
But this sounds more like "making your leisure time fulfilling is a life skill and a mental health challenge", not "leisure time doesn't exist because we're forced to use it on certain things".
I evidently misinterpreted GP's incoherent comment as claiming that we were enslaved by the entertainment itself, as some commentary about the inescapable addiction of modern media.
no, it means being forced to produce entertainment for others to live is slavery, and a very degrading form of slavery. work on your own fucking reading comprehension.
it's not a fucking analogy, if I don't pay rent I get thrown out on the street, or resort to prostitution (would you call that spending free time in the entertainment biz? fuck you), that's slavery, i'm not fucking worried about watching TV, truly the least of my problems. wake the fuck up
Consider working on both your writing clarity and reading comprehension. "It's not leisure if you don't like it" and "Slavery in entertainment" are easily interpretable as claiming that the entertainment itself is slavery, not the incoherent claim that we're enslaved by the need to work and also entertainment exists. And my comment is quite clearly addressing the latter claim.
Of course, I'd work on your emotional stability first. Seriously, man: wild-eyed cursing at internet strangers for imaginary statements they didn't make is the modern equivalent of getting into a screaming match with the voices in your head. I truly wish you all the best.
i'd work on shutting the fuck up, because your speech reflects your underlying assumptions and if you don't address them soon someone like me will address them for you, slaver
I think it's broadly true that people have a lot more leisure time that they think. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has surveys on how Americans spend their time[1]. Across the entire population, people spend 3.61 hours per day on Work and work-related activities, vs 5.19 hours per day on Leisure and sports.
If that seems a bit off, consider that a lot of people barely work at all (especially those under 25 and over 65), and those that have full time employment usually only work 5 days per week, which lowers the average hours per day considerably. So throughout an entire lifetime, I think it's true that Americans spend a lot more time on leisure and sport than on work. It just doesn't feel that way, especially when you're in prime working age.
But even full time employed parents (probably the group that perceives themselves most time starved) still spend 2.95 (mothers) to 3.52 (fathers) hours per day on Leisure and sports[2].
This is such a useful comment, especially about ages.
I would bet a higher percentage of people under 21 today are still in school, vs 100 years ago. School is not leisure time, but comes with leisure time.
And on the old end, Social Security and Medicare are probably allowing a higher percentage of people over 65 to enjoy a full retirement, vs 100 years ago.
It's funny seeing so many people who spend hours every day on social media or Netflix or Steam claim that they have no time. We can see the data on how many hours are being consumed.
I think part of it is burn out. I have been getting more and more so the past few months. As a result I stopped pursing an AWS cert. The thought of opening my Ancient Greek textbooks brings no joy. As a result I play Skyrim.
Saying “I don’t have the time” means “I don’t have the will.”
My armchair hypothesis is that using your phone, internet, or TV lacks sensory novelty--you frequently sit in the same place, doing the same thing.
It's a repeated stimuli, which causes your brain to filter a lot of it and discard it, leading to the feeling like a night watching TV was a night doing nothing. Your memory of watching TV blends with all memories of you watching TV, especially after a few days have passed.
You have to switch up your routine and do something new or otherwise different, and you will retain a memory of that event much more clearly and it will feel like you "did something".
My most clear memory of a night in the past week was game night where we played a physical card game. I don't remember any individual night where we watched TV.
In many cases, modern work responsibilities and expectations. Creative/office work is more ambiguous and takes an outsized mental toll compared to physical work. These people need to veg out basically and can only do completely passive leisure activities.
There was an NPR “wait wait don’t tell me” episode question a couple of years back that went “most respondents in the survey said they don’t have the energy after work to do _______” what?
1.) The "it is the same people" thing is your guess, something you want to be true. It is not something born of facts. There are people who play games 30 hours a week ... and then there are people who never play them. And this is the most important point here.
2.) Specifically with Netflix, people watch Netflix while doing other things or when when they are already tired. I turn on tv or listen podcasts when cooking or cleaning or am doing other boring activities. Or when watching small children.
3.) For many people, these are evening activities and activities they use to relax - when they are actually tired. When I watch netflix or turn on game, typically it is in the evening when I am tired. I cant code, I cant read something educational or difficult, my brain is tired.
4.) There are some people who spend a lot of time on Netflix who also say they dont have time. These people pretty often are trying to say polite "no" to whatever you want them. They are trying to reject you without making you feel bad.
> people watch Netflix while doing other things or when when they are already tired. I turn on tv or listen podcasts when cooking or cleaning or am doing other boring activities
You don't think this counts as leisure time? Cooking while listening to music or a podcast is much more enjoyable than doing it in silence.
If you watch while cooking or cleaning, then your "I don't have a time" is still quite true and non-puzzling. You are doing work that needs to be done, just in slightly more pleasant way.
There is a big philosophical debate about the definitions of labour, idleness, and leisure [1]. While that debate is far from settled, I think we can agree that there is a difference between sitting around watching TV or playing video games and learning to sculpt or play the violin. I think we might also agree that this difference is deeper than its relationship to social class, though that may be a part of it.
So what is it? I think these sorts of “idle activities” like TV and games carry with them a burden of guilt that our time could be better spent pursuing a hobby or otherwise learning something which might enrich our lives beyond the mere time we spend doing the activity.
So why do we spend all this time on idleness instead of hobby, sport, music, or other “higher leisure” activities (folk dancing?)? I think, and it’s been argued quite effectively, that work has become all-consuming in our lives even if it hasn’t taken all of our time. For many of us now, work is a mentally rather than physically taxing task. We get home from work (or log off the computer and walk out of the home office) but our minds are still at work. We think about the problems we’re trying to solve outside of work hours. Many of us are also on-call to deal with any crisis affecting the business, even after work hours or on the weekends.
We never get off work! And that’s why we have no time for leisure. Any time we have outside of active work we spend on idle activities like TV or video games so that we can drown out our chattering minds. Pursuing a quiet activity like reading or woodworking is just too difficult if we’re still thinking about work (or worse, worrying about being on-call).
What is leisure anyway? Is it just an easy work/not-work split? I'm not sure it's so easy anymore when so much of our off-work activity is either stress-inducing or basically working for free. Sure, we're not darning socks anymore, but consider this:
Is managing one's 'personal brand' on the many social media sites leisure time?
If you're doing mundane activities that generates value for a social media company, is it leisure time? For example vetting, posting and re-posting ad copy is basically a low-level marketing job, yet a large percentage of the population say that they spend hours a day doing this.
What percentage of our 'leisure time' is spent watching or listening to ads? Is that truly leisure?
I guess the argument goes that we choose if and when to do these things - I wonder how much people really feel like they have a choice in the matter anymore.
Cooking is another good example of how hard it is to separate work and leisure.
Everyone needs to eat, so getting/preparing food is work in some sense. There’s a hobby/leisure component too though: you definitely don’t need to spend two hours every day cooking a perfect coq au vin or visiting farm stands to find the tastiest, most interesting produce. On the gripping hand, doing the absolute bare minimum (Soylent or pot noodles or whatever) might be okay for a little while, but many people don’t find it physically or mentally sufficient for the long term either.
The article, and people in general, don’t seem to acknowledge that consumption has increased as well. For example my 795sqft house would not be on the radar of most families but it was typical for the area when it was built in 1946. Productivity gains have been directed to increased consumption rather than leisure as Keynes envisioned. If you ask people how much is enough, the answers are often laughable.
To be explicit, I don’t think individual consumption explains the whole story (e.g. inequality and wealth distribution) but normalizing for it paints a clearer picture.
Every generation looks at technological progress and predicts the obvious conclusion, that people will have more leisure time. It’s easy to see that what you are doing now will be easier and quicker. They don’t see the new things that people will be doing, new social structures to adapt and compete in, new information to process, and especially the cognitive burden of managing risk in so many new choices.
The simplest example that we can relate to may be email. Before email, writing letters was awful. You got out a nice pen and paper and whiteout, and carefully wrote in your best penmanship a few pages to your grandmother thanking her for a nice new pair of socks. You did this twice a year. Now we have email, and the whole family sends low-effort messages and photos every day. Nobody would have guessed that this was any sort of need, but you do need to do it because family inclusion and affection is now competitive and that is a basic need.
Almost nothing we are spending our time on right now would be considered a need even 50 years ago, but most of it is spent trying to satisfy a need that was easy for them. Much of that is spent “working”, which is mostly now just wasted time and miserable interactions under artificial stress and unending hours. That makes people feel awful, and ruins any leisure time they might have had.
Any by the way, some people here are saying that rich people have leisure on the backs of the working class. Just look at their families. They’re not healthy, nor happy. They are scared to death in every moment of losing everything, and they can’t trust anybody. Don’t envy them. It may look like leisure but it doesn’t feel like it.
You don't see the leisure rich, because they don't "advertise" - they often have a few million in total assets and work on things they want to - you find them in non-profits, etc.
You could also consider the FIRE people to be leisure rich - often at even lower total assets. Paid off house, modest investments, even more modest expenses.
There is simply no way throwing my stuff in the washer every week could cost anywhere near hand washing, unless I simply wore dirty clothes 9 months out of the year.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadThis is like blaming your alcoholism on Budweiser or your obesity on McDonalds. Sure, it’s certainly part of the problem, but it’s hardly the primary cause.
People are lazy, and learning the truth about complicated things is harder than just making your mind up quickly based on garbage information.
Even then, YouTube is rife with Ben Shapiro/Russell Brand/Jordan Peterson/Bill Maher/etc. videos regardless.
Social media is an utter dumpster fire for nonsense propaganda and misinformation.
The web has become vastly more manipulated than mainstream media.
People want to be entertained, and they want to be told what to think.
What are your views on the cause of the american civil war and war of independence? Did the papers back then cause it all?
I can't believe how fast casual racism is regressing.
Yet from here, BLM seems to clearly be a US election phenomena rather than a general desire to fix things. It basically disappeared after the last election and the election before that.
I'd happily bet on it arising again in 2024.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-10-01%202...
Being one of the few levers that citizens have to pull, it is unsurprising that elections create stir over issues that are perpetually important.
Nevertheless with respect to the trend chart, correlation ≠ causation. The spring/summer peak in BLM activity was temporally related to the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. Were other factors involved? Likely; but it would take more social science to tease out, rather than Google trends.
> I have no horse in this race
Maybe not in a direct political sense. I don’t live in the U.S. either; but the BLM protests in my country pointed to a moral solidarity that transcends political boundaries. “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
What actual changes occurred in your country due to the Black Lives Matter movement in a legal sense? Did it result in less police deaths? Covid probably threw a spanner in the works judging such things but for many countries it's likely more their own way to vote on US politics by having people out in the streets than a domestic issue.
It's a US phenomena exported and regurgitated by many others across the west who simply don't have these systemic problems with their police force at all. This concern only really appears once every four years in foreign countries.
Why is no one protesting today, truly? Did the whole BLM movement just decide that brutality stopped? The stats seem the same.
Think it will appear again across the planet in the lead up to the 2024 US election. And your country, along with mine, will be highly concerned about police brutality that doesn't exist in our own nations.
An argument can even be made that much of the success of america and the west is the result of free time gained by slavery, colonialism and armed robbery of land.
"Cops should stop killing us" vs "no, cops are great" and you look at that and say "you guys have too much free time, you wouldn't care otherwise"? I smell ulterior motive here.
Yes surely this is a good representative experiment.
() https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/09/too-much-fre...
> Once again, the researchers found that higher levels of free time were significantly associated with higher levels of well-being, but only up to a point. After that, excess free time was not associated with greater well-being.
The point made is more similar to wealth correlating to happiness up to a point. The article concludes that it's a sense of purpose that matters to people, not work. Your comment is a bit obfuscating.
But we should recognize that humans are sometimes happier having some clear directions to follow and tasks to perform. Depends on the person and the situation, of course.
But it's also human nature that everyone wants to be the one giving the directions, even if it makes them unhappy.
Is itself a theory of human nature, and I think, probably amongst the implausible.
We're a species of greater ape, a vast amount can be said straightforwardly.
Well, as long as the only reachable consequence is not "too bad, you are going to be exploited by someone else and then you die".
Thinking there is inherent meaning in salaried or at-will work is more ideological than factual. This can be scrapped for: being creative or productive with one's time. And this isn't tied to a job contract to an employer that is, more often than not, brutal to you.
That seems like a very conservative outlook. History has taught us that progress is overwhelmingly good for society and the downsides are:
"As we all know" aside - what's wrong with slacking off? Does painting, writing poetry, playing sports with kids, learning an instrument count as slacking off? Why does spending 8 hours a day at a job where you perform some rote, pointless, abstract task - like sending emails and having meetings about advertising - count as _not_ slacking off?
Obesity, suicide and depression have not been rising under conditions of an excess of leisure, they have been rising under a regimen of constant, precarious toil for less return, more alienated from the benefit of the work itself.
Human beings thrive when the boot of your smug ideology is taken off of their throats.
I don’t know anyone who would call “painting, writing poetry, playing sports with kids, learning an instrument” slacking off.
And having lived in both wealthy communities and among poor communities in developing countries it amazing the general mood among the poor seems to ve much more positive and less anxious and neurotic.
My interpretation is humans thrive when they have a purpose and for many people work is a purpose either what they produce themselves or what they use their gains for - family, children, building a future.
And when there is no purpose and there is no need to do anything, many people become lost and fall into negative self-harm.
So no, it’s not that work is a requirement, but productivity in whatever does seem a natural fit for humans.
I've noticed that too. Here are some of the potential reasons that come to my mind:
1. Their day to day lives are less complex. If they work in jobs, they usually perform a routine set of tasks that can be more or less done on mental autopilot. If they're self-employed (usually farmers), they have to plan and worry about the future, but at least they're not subject to a set of pointless, unknown and arbitrary rules like people in complex office jobs are.
2. Their jobs are (on average) more physical and involve more genuine contact with people.
3. They often stay around the place where they were born and when their entire family is. This gives them both rich social life, help with raising children, as well as a safety net.
4. They're not conditioned to strive to be excellent, an "industry leader" or a great artist etc. They're perfectly content with boring/low-status jobs as long as they pay for the important things in their lives, such as their family.
Most people don't enjoy their job, or jobs.
Most people don't like commuting rediculious distances just to make rent, and eat.
Most people realalized during Covid they might have been happier.
The virtual/physical infrastructure wouldn't have been built with work from home. This is our first experiment with working from home, and it went pretty well. Many jobs, with the help of technology, could be done at home.
We still don't know why so many lousy jobs are going unfilled. My take is adult kids moved home--a home they will never afford, and lived with their parents, and it was better than paying 80% of your paycheck for a lousy apartment.
I've always felt the world has two types of people. Those that built their lives around work. They come home, and even like to talk about it. You take their job away, and yes, they loose their identity.
Then there's the slacker, like myself. Work is unpleasant, unfulfilling, mind numbing, thing I just have to do. I don't enjoy really any of it be it the early show up times, or my superiors, and especially the long commute. I could care less about the company. I would be robbing the joint blind if the penalties weren't so severe.
I do know this, but most people don't have a say in the matter:
I have known way to many males wait to long to retire, and because all their personality was geared towards working don't last long. And we men just die so dam early to begin with.
I once got a peak at some union delagates debating retirement ages. It was Local 6 electrical. Guys could retire at 55, or 65. At 65 they got more money. You stll had to put 25 years in both plans. The union liked the 65 year old plan. Why? Because the retirees would only collect a handful of retirement checks before dying. They told retirees they would cover 100% of health care costs at 65 knowing these guys wern't going to see 65. Local 6 union is one of the better unions in the USA too.
You see, that’s the problem that you conveniently skip.
They are not unemployed, they stopped getting money too. They did not returned to previous jobs and found new better jobs.
How much per person do you think they received?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52HpzZ4HT4g
TL;DR - employers left the employees first. The first time economic uncertainty hit their business, they dropped as many people as possible. This led employees to reconsider their relationships to their employers and work, especially realizing they couldn't rely on a steady paycheck.
The premise was a (socialist?) vision that everything would be done by robots by 2000, and we would have to find good hobbies and interests, keep fit and volunteer doing good things for our communities.
I think digital technology did the opposite in many ways. It turned us into robots.
Another thing I noted while reading the article is it mentions trades as the best sort of work. If you're a plumber, bricklayer, or electrician then every job has an end. A wall is finished when you lay the last brick.
By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to.
Like that page that said "You have reached the end of the Internet", I sometimes wonder if Microsoft might one day release "Windows Final Edition" , the operating system that is finished.
Go home developers. Your work is complete. Well done!
What I think you may be feeling though, is that working on software sometimes feels "endless", but that's really what happens when a project is poorly managed and no "strategic milestones" are reached. This is particularly severe in web dev, less so in the game dev scene where there are more of those "definite walls" to reach.
Most programming doesn't have the first and only sometimes do you get the second. It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever. Programming is like being a contractor building the Winchester mansion.
So it would be like owning a house?
The difference that you are probably feeling here, at least from what i can see, is that once a house is built by a construction company, it is "handed over" pretty much completely, whereas with software there is almost never such a handover, but instead a "support period". This I suppose can lead to fatigue as you end up never reaching a "final final" product per se like the house.
Personally, i have always found it helpful to plan by milestones/major versions, such that it, in a "hack the human brain" kind of way, provides a synthetic almost-copy of that " ah, all done, time to move on" that the human brain gets when a house is built, or a mountain is climbed.
Interesting philosophies hidden within all this, particularly for team leads and such of dev teams.
sure, business needs and software/IT complexity explosion means that only a small fraction of the problem-design space gets properly covered pushed the majority of the industry toward more agility
The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up.
At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet!
- - - -
Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?)
Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.
You're talking about telic (finite) vs atelic (infinite) activities. Life needs a balance in the matrix of [painful/pleasurable + telic/atelic].
Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work.
I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favorite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Plus if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
> Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work.
You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all without telos, other than as ends in themselves.
However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life.
Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away from.
> I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them.
Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag you.
> if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness of so much activity.
I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle.
I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.
I've worked lots in both, and it really is not. There's something satisfying about the physical movements, and being in different locations, about the house building work, but that is very different to the issue of completion of work you mentioned and I guess you just never did more than one physical building job?
Jevons' Paradox I suspect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
If you live in a free country, how can you have a concept of excess free time?
Surely the goal for free people is to maximise time free to do as they please? Otherwise they’re by some definition not free.
I discovered that going for a run, doing a physical project, and socializing took more effort to start, but was vastly more relaxing and recharging.
Consider the general behavior of people on social media in that light.
If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like!
I suspect a big problem is that many people actually don't know what they like to do. Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. (If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem)
This is definitely a factor. It isn't just work: Maybe you 'only' work 40 hours a week. So does your spouse, though, and the children still need things as well. Housework still needs done, and someone has to produce food daily. It doesn't leave much time at all.
The other factor is money: If you have little to no money leftover to do anything, you aren't going to do it. Netflix and youtube are fairly low cost entertainment and can get you through a month, not to mention that they provide some sort of entertainment while you are doing other things much like radios used to. Housework is better when you are entertained.
It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be the political elite or the entrepreneurs or should it be inherited or or should it be the the people from special blood or religion or should no one be bourgeoisie and everyone should be working but you can't really argue over the resources and work done that is need to sustain a society.
You simply cannot have all the population on planet Earth retire on their savings because you cannot eat the numbers on the screen. With automation, robotics and other technologies we can increase the productivity and as a result we can afford to have greater percentage of people in leisure but we are nowhere near total machine labor. In fact, the percentage of non-working people probably is not that different than the past because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.
In dominant countries you might have the percentage higher and live off on imports from countries where everyone works much harder but the gap evaporates as these countries catch up.
So, the trick is to be part of a society that is so much advanced than the rest that their produce can buy off the produce of the society that relies on hard work. You can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas but this scheme falls apart when Hondurans start making their own apps and now you need to grow your own bananas.
It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.)
It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population.
[0] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.
Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.
Citations required
I do not agree whatsoever, just because you don't have the imagination to come up with a better system for organizing labor and resources doesn't mean it isn't possible
The idea, your idea is that there's a way to tell everybody what to do to make all the things work and everyone will follow the plan and like their spot in it. You lack the imagination to recognize individual will let alone the fact that society works because there are millions of experts making choices everyday. No central planning board to 'organize' 'labor' can accomplish that or house the knowledge of these individuals
If you traveled a bit around the world, maybe you could see that nothing is binary, and neither is this topic.
Elites always exist in some form, yes. They do not always have to be so disproportionally distanced from rest of population like in US, not in democracies, not so untouchable. There are tons of countries, ie in Europe who are managing this in much better way.
The wider problem/situation I see is that US is much more everybody-for-themselves-and-fuck-the-rest because it maximizes direct incomes of few (ignoring how much they will spend on ie healthcare or education of their kids, these 2 can easily wipe out aby gains for middle/upper middle class), rather than living in actual modern society.
The logic of 'contributing back and improving place you live actually comes back to you too and creates something better for future of you/your kids' somehow didn't click in US that much. I saw first hand rather primitive knee-jerk reactions in ie bible belt in US that equate well working society with socialism, (I guess phonetical step not too big, logical though much bigger) and well that's communism and you should be deported/jailed/shot on spot.
That's the attitude that, unfortunately, will also be found in America.
So, for those that have worked, have sacrificed, we aren't interested in hearing the solutions posed from a homogenous society of one distinct culture and obvious problems with irregularities or deviations from the norm.... Here's looking at you Nords
The retirees in your example, with great probability, either have to rely on outside support (be it children or social security), or they will die with lots of wealth left over (aka inheritance). I hate to sound like a crummy communist, but this is a distribution problem, first and foremost.
Yes, or alternatively, you can live in a society which uses coups, death squads, and puppet dictators to keep Honduran labor cheap.
This way or another the main equation never changes. That is, the resources we consume are below the resources we produce. Left or right, communists or capitalist or other kind of ideologues are just different groups of people who have different ideas on how to distribute the roles.
US foreign policy and actions of private companies have absolutely decimated other countries, cultures, and economies so now those countries are reliant on the income from rich US capitalists exploiting their populace's dire straights. That we placed them in.
The goal should not be for everyone to do no work.
The goal should not be for everyone to work full time and fear unemployment.
The kibbutzniks worked a lot harder than U.S. office workers, but didn't have the problem of alienation and the epidemic of mental ill-health (plus chronic inflammation, obesity, et al) that we have.
Almost all of us want the institutional, authoritarian nightmare we call "Work" to die, and it's past high time that it does... but, unfortunately, we've been stripped of our imagination when it comes to the question of how work (that is, useful activity) will get done without it.
Medical and educational costs have risen in the US, I would argue for the same reason.
And some adversarial work has expanded for no reason- look at all the effort spent in high frequency trading that could be replaced by venues running auctions every 100ms instead of having competitions for fractions of a microsecond.
I don't believe most of this increasing agricultural productivity is due to us buying things from poor countries, although it's probably a factor at some level. I think it's due to the increasing technological sophistication of farming: the breeding of more productive crops, the use of tractors, the use of fertiliser both synthetic and man-made, better understanding and monitoring of soil health, better storage and better supply chains, new weedkillers, automated and partially automated animal handling, refrigeration and freezers, and everything else.
I do understand that someone has to do some work, but if we could have 8.8% of our population work in agriculture for 10 hours a week and not have to compete for housing against 40 hours a week incomes[0], that would be pretty great.
[0] Numbers are wrong: farmers work more than 40 hours a week. I think they explain the general point well enough, though.
Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.
This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?
Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.
And you'd have to assume nobody would change jobs. It's a useless extrapolation.
- the world is at literal subsistence level overall
- all nominal gains in productivity are just shuffling numbers around
- if anyone at all stops working, people will die
This seems obviously untrue given the increase in agricultural productivity. I know a few farmers, and none of them think agricultural productivity has stayed the same. Additionally, it seems really obvious that lots of industrial production is now going towards making luxury cars, TVs, smartphones, bigger houses, better healthcare, etc. and that not all of these are necessary for agricultural production.
Even further, global food insecurity has been decreasing. Only 8.9% of the world's population are food insecure, and prior to the war in Ukraine, those people mostly didn't live in agriculturally productive areas. I find it hard to believe that the remaining 91% are living off the work of the 8.9%. I think a much simpler explanation is that agriculture has actually gotten more productive even if you include the cost of making tractors.
I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.
But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get.
Same for petrochemicals, steel.
I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.
Don’t forget "rising living standards" which in Western cultures is an euphemism for "extravagant consumption".
How about we don't succumb to the desire to pull strawmen and focus on simple things to accomplish such as being able to make a honest living that leaves you with disposable income after covering all your cost of living with a simple 9-to-5 job?
Where does this need to create the illusion that there is possibly no grey area between a homeless slacker and a glorious millionaire investor?
Is it too much to ask the most prosperous economy in the history of the world to allow workers to actually live a modest life with your salary? Otherwise, why would those workers continue to support that absurd society?
When I was younger, I multiple times tried to cut of all mindless crap like tv or browsing. It led to lite depression and low productivity every single time. Conversely, when I had a lot of free time or worked on easy boring project, the stuff I do in free time became more intellectually difficult without me intentionally going for it.
My point here is that people cant be productive all the time. We do need some amount of mindless chill, be it tv or low key socialization.
A hour or two of unwinding with a book or a Star Trek episode, talking about vacation with your SO or something else to get your mind off work is essential.
Which makes excessive work even more problematic. You have to commute, shop, do chores AND unwind.
Leaving aside the question of the merit of work, I think a consistently low-productivity lifestyle leads to negative symptoms.
(If I lived in suburbs where HOA makes it impossible to have garden, I might end up purely passive and depressed simply due to no activity being possible.)
This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.
The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.
That’s an opinion.
On a personal level, I can say my managers try to be good people, although the may not always do the best thing. In my case, my wife has stage 4 cancer and they have been tremendously supportive.
Edit: I should probably mention for full transparency I work at Amazon as it is sited in the article.
Some solutions include gaining leverage over existing systems of control (e.g. management), cooperation with like minded people to form a group for protection (like a prison gang), carving out domains of autonomy from systems of control, or just stop feeding the more oppressive patterns in all aspects of life
We've had to ask you before not to post like this. If you keep it up, we're going to have to ban you—not because we disagree with your views (we don't know or care what those are) but because we don't want this place to burn to a crisp.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Comparing the role of middle managers to “house negros” or prison gang leaders is emotionally-charged drivel.
Distinct labor pools were much more at hand in places like Jamaica where the average plantation was much larger than in the American south.
This is a similar distortion to the way people use 'Uncle Tom' when, ironically enough, the actual literary character is the opposite of the political distinction implied by pejorative use
Uncle Tom's cabin has been lauded and critiqued since the day it was published so it's a little bit of a stretch to call this a 'distortion'.
A manager's goal is to enforce submission.
People love to consume art but don’t value the arts. People love the idea of kids - especially “at risk youth” - having technical or otherwise just interesting programming, yet in the case of audio production like I mentioned above there is just one nonprofit here busting its ass trying to make it happen as the only entity attempting it.
All of this is to say, if I didn’t have to worry about making a living and had a bunch of leisure time, I would be putting my time and energy towards these endeavors. Because I think they are valuable, they mean something to me, and I think society would benefit from it too. Unfortunately we have this ridiculous habit of tying morality to work in the US as a result of our Puritan hangover, which means I am not able to pursue the above unless someone deems it worthy of sustained funding (they won’t because virtually no ROI on documentaries or ethical kids programs) or I am sitting on a nest egg most people can’t ever achieve so I don’t have to worry about surviving.
Sorry for the semi-rant. The negative ripple effect tying work to morality has on our society is truly hard to overstate and it upsets me a lot. It’s such a cynical view of people and, unfortunately, is often tied to racial perceptions as well.
I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is producing, so it's generally assumed that someone with a full time job produces enough to cover their needs while the unemployed surviving off of welfare do not.
We even make allowances for people trying to reach net positive production. Students, for example, aren't typically looked down upon. It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.
This is how we end up with no art, no music, no culture, no raising of the future generations etc. If the only metric via which we value time spent and effort spent is money earned none of these (very important) things can compare even to the most useless widget making / admin job.
Do we even know what it is to be human anymore?
This is one of the most common methods I see employed by bad-faith conversationalist and it's sickening. Your point should stand on it's own merit, not on your ability to invalidate the "oppositions" side.
Hey ease off throttle man. This isn’t Reddit.
>but they earn a decent living wage in most areas.
Debatable and only part of the problem. Education is a terrible example for you to bring up, as evidenced by the absurdly low salaries they receive combined with the broad expectations of their job (therapy, education, tutoring, crisis intervention, nutrition, baby sitting, special needs identification, the list goes on).
Have you seen the turnover rates in education? It’s in an appalling state. No resources, garbage pay, and now they’re being asked to shoot back at school shooters as their schools are redesigned to look like prisons, all while politicians play tug of war with their curriculum as a proxy battle for social policies.
The sad fact is we don’t value educators in the US. Hell we don’t value caregivers much either.
Is producing cigarettes, making apps more addictives, making food superpalatable, synthetizing pernicious drugs and so on more valuable than producing documentaries, studying ancient languages and civilazations, studying exoterical physics topics?
Not everything that we're paying for is valuable and not everything valuable is being paid for.
All the things you mentioned provide at least short term tangible benefits to the consumers. How will the average person benefit from the study of ancient languages and civilizations or esoteric physics? People already pay for documentaries they're interested in, there's a reason they're produced. Why do you think academia for academia's sake is inherently beneficial for the rest of society? I see this notion of expressed here and elsewhere that if something is academically challenging or interesting, it must therefore be good to spend time studying.
Honestly all of these threads could be distilled into this simple point. Way more concise than what I wrote that’s for sure haha.
Your view is manifestly incorrect. There are so many groups of people that are looked down upon, what you describe is just a tiny tiny subset of these. If you are grasping to find an example, that shows a great deal about your position in life.
(If you still struggling, start with sex workers, people working in waste management, and people with physical disabilities, aka 'hookers' and 'trash people' and 'cripples'. Yeah, they definitely not looked down upon. LOL. I could literally write 10 pages of further examples.)
> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon *for not working a typically job.*, and rightfully so
Really you should try to avoid taking things intentionally out of context and getting yourself worked up over, it's not healthy.
Also, do you think documentaries are valuable? Because the vast majority do not have investors and do not make much money. Frankly without grants we’d barely have any.
If people don't "have" to do anything, they generally don't do much. Especially today where attention is easily hijacked by passive electronic consumption, advertisers. This leads to problems. Low motivation, ennui, health issues. It's not a question of "discovering what one likes to do".
There is a strong incentive to craft a narrative where their present lifestyle (live in a filthy city, busy all the time, etc) is, if not the best possible, at least unavoidable.
The alternative is depression.
/short version.
Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?
It’s only when you compare full retirement vs part time work that there is something of an aberration. But, that tends to be a self selecting population.
As an anecdote to the contrary, I've just exited a half-year period of unemployment during which I spent a lot of time on hobbies, started eating much better, had nearly no stress in life, and built up a steady exercise routine. I met a lot of people from around the world and learned about them and the places they came from. I'd casually go on bike rides wherever and whenever I wanted and my absolute priority was my own well-being. Now I'm like a completely different person: stronger, more confident, healthier, and more appreciative and aware of the things in life that bring me joy.
I probably dragged out that stage of my life longer than I needed to or should have, because it was just so liberating. It felt like I was doing right by my body and soul for the first time in my life. Were it not for my slowly dwindling savings, I might have stayed even longer living like that. And that's the case of doing zero work. In a society with an emphasis on leisure you'd more likely be looking at work with flexible/reduced hours or extended vacations.
I’d love to see a proper analysis but there’s lots of evidence both ways. Some people with excess leisure would end up doing nothing. Some would work on hobbies. Some would start businesses or maybe participate in local government or something.
It might also be that, given enough time in a leisure society, people would adapt for better or worse.
This is categorically untrue for much (I'd hazard to say most) of the population. It's certainly untrue for me. I don't like feeling full, and I don't really gain weight when I eat whatever I want.
The “Protestant work ethic” has played a role in shaping American social views about work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
American society often anchors identity in work (“Nice to meet you. What do you do?”). An example search result for “work and American identity” turned up this survey from 2014: 55% of Americans get a sense of identity from their job. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...
I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write.
As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do.
Or as Bukowski wrote:
"if you're going to create you're going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you're going to create in a small room with 3 children while you're on welfare, you're going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you're going to create blind crippled demented, you're going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment, flood and fire."
In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.
Grandparents also still go to work, do no help on that front either.
>Just why this has happened is both a mystery and a paradox.
No paradox. One way to make more money is to work more.
>One way to make more money is to work more.
In these discussions it's worth remembering the second order effects of hours worked on pay. The first order effect is that an hourly rate multiplied by more hours is a higher number. But if you're hourly, working long hours puts more of your time in overtime in any official hourly sort of situation. More importantly, it means that you're getting good at your job at an uncommonly high rate, and you're the person who's always around, who knows more and is getting things done. It's hard to promote someone else in this scenario. And for the person working, it's hard to not quickly outgrow the job in this way.
Finally, an analogy: my brother spends way more of his time playing basketball than I do. It's not that I can get all the basketball I need done in 20 minutes a week whereas it takes him 5 hours. I just suck at basketball, so I don't care to play.
Not if you can't get schedules for more hours which is the situation millions of people are in also a lot of people can't pay others to do their chores and such for them so they have to do that themselves which can take a lot of time.
One of them is philosophy. There is a great deal of benefit and pleasure that a person can derive from learning about about and understanding the arguments that have been made across the centuries.
Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk.
Another are video games that stimulate your brain in an amazing way. Another is spending time close to nature. Another is talking and listening to people.
When I come across a person that tells me "But what would you do if you had more free time?", I realize it's like this because people can't imagine a different world. They don't know how to live freely. So they willfully fight to maintain this broken world, insisting that it's the only way.
So I do my work, try to get it done as fast as possible. I earn a lot, but my work makes no difference to anyone's life. If I could get 1/10 of what I earn but without having to perform all this theatre, it would be better for everyone.
What does this mean? You would take a 90% pay cut for 90% less work? Seems pretty doable
I agree that most employers wont offer 10% positions, but my feeling is that someone can work 10-20% for 10% pay by gigging pretty easily.
Whether 10% pay is sustainable is a different question, but I was under the impression that you thought it was.
If you are looking for 10% work and 50% pay, I agree that is much less attainable.
Im a bit skeptical that the poster would actually be happy with 10% pay, which would probably not cover the insurance, shelter, and food they are used to.
That said, I am open minded and there are certainly people that do live on 10% of a SWE salary. You can rent a mobile home in a low CoL area, get on Medicaid, and have a lot of free time. Some people do exactly this, but it is a pretty rare breed.
It’s doable, but not on a standard employment contract.
No idea how to deal with the uncertainty of being able to get enough contracts that pay enough.
Do you just enjoy reading about it and that's it? Or how do you make philisophy interactive and interesting beyond satisfying curiousites? I got kind of into some sub topics of philosophy, but lost a lot of motivation once i realized no one cares about what you have to say or even really wants to cater to you unless your part of academia
Understanding such a text often is an interactive experience - you formulate your own claims and try to relate then to the argument that the text contains. It's challenging but very satisfying.
Nevertheless, it helps to have teachers - joining courses lead by people who learned philosophy in academia is a common way to find them. YMMV, and it depends on what's available to you locally.
>> Another is physical activity. It feels great to move your body, it makes you so much happier than sitting at a desk
Maybe you should get a job doing repetitive manual labor. You get plenty of activity and it is completely mindless so you can be thinking about whatever you want. That's how it was for me at least.
1. Both couple partners have to work in the past only one.
2. We work more.
3. We take loans (obligate to future work).
Why is it so? I always hear that. I am not married yet but I keep it a little challenge to myself to one day disprove that.
I believe with a clever lifestyle of not spending on useless stuff and moving into a cheap region one can easily make that work.
So I say, brazenly and naively ...
If children aren't a life goal for you, it gets a lot easier.
Things like older cars, smaller houses, location differences, etc. But there are major cost savings that offset, especially with the kids. Single car may work out, less gas, less tax, even less food expenses (many people faced with two incomes eat out more, and prepare food less).
Seeing people do is on $40k salaries means it should be entirely possible on larger ones. Note that if you want to try, it is almost always best for the lower earner to be the one who "stays home" so as to maximize income and minimize tax.
Also "not working a 9-5" is not synonymous with "no income" - there are actual non-scammy work that can be done at home in spare time if desired, and things like teaching exercise class, coaching, also exist.
Your last point is very good as well. I wouldn't want my wife to do nothing, just not slave off at some stupid corporate 9-5 job lessening her, mine and our children's quality of life. There are so many options for quality remote work these days.
We've done this for 17 years now on my salary which has been maybe a little over the national median for software engineers in that time. We live in a median-cost city. Since we are homeschooling, we have avoided communities with high property taxes (we pay 50% less than our neighbors in good school districts).
We've had two cars the entire time, although we'll let them age rather than trade them in for newer models. Our house is modest and we were actually able to pay off the mortgage years early. We max out my 401k and our IRA contributions.
We don't take fancy vacations, which is more of a personal preference rather than a cost cutting decision.
At this point everything is completely commingled financially and we just think of it as our money. Legally that's pretty much the way it is, if we were to get divorced (not going to happen) my wife would be entitled to half of everything (including my 401k). My sister was in a similar situation and I saw this happen in her divorce.
So there are safeguards for the non-working spouse. But still, if there isn't a high degree of trust and openness in the relationship it might not be a good idea. It has been great for our children.
This is easy to do alone. Bring a partner into your life and slowly but surely you will be seen as a resource to be maxed out and consumed.
I know billionaires that share your dream. Do it. Save yourself. Go now.
Statistically, people in long-term committed relationships have more stable incomes, longer lives, and better outcomes than those who don’t [1]. The direction of causality is somewhat unclear, but that such a relationship exists at all is a fairly strong refutation of your claim.
Which isn’t to say that all of them work out or that it is always sunshine and rainbows. But there is nothing inevitable about the outcome you claim. It’s actually lower probability.
1. https://docs.iza.org/dp998.pdf
New houses have more than doubled in size since the 1950s while holding one less occupant on average.
Houses have a lot more amenities than they used to have, like AC and a clothes dryer instead of a clothes line.
We have torn down about a million SROs* since the 1950s and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle housing.
We are more car oriented than in the past and cars are typically the second largest expense in a household budget and they've gotten crazy expensive as well.
Having said that, I will recommend the (possibly out of print) book How to survive without a salary by Charles Long in support of your crazy plan. ;)
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
Thanks for the recommendation!
Heck, it can be difficult enough after a couple of extended parental leaves, much less half a marriage.
With more even distribution I could totally see more middle class deciding they've got a "good" life and no reason to work another 20 hours extra.
I can’t easily make six figures, nor can SWEs in many other places of the world.
With that said, I do enjoy more leisure (4 day workweek). I know that’s a privilege as well.
Greetings from Europe
Check out the salaries on levels.fyi
And no, it is not reasonable to make 100k in the Midwest instead. Unless you're buying like $50,000 worth of gas and eggs per year, you're going to save WAY more in the SF Bay Area and reclaim years of your life by retiring earlier
And it'll have a lawn instead of a tent city.
Having lived in Toledo before, the Midwest has its own economic problems (yes, not even the unhoused want to setup tent cities there).
I've got a safe, friendly, walkable neighborhood, and my mortgage is 6 percent of my gross income. The bay area is not the only place where you can save a lot of money.
There's definitely a tradeoff, but it's disingenuous to imply that it's a good financial move to take a 50% pay cut
That said, these last couple of years remote work has really taken off, so maybe you can have your nice house in the Midwest and retire early in it too
Most people on this site are severely lacking.
We often talk about the distribution of wealth, but I wonder about the distribution of labor consumption and physical goods.
I think it would be a interesting lens to look at the same question with different implications.
I fear that the reason that applies much more often is that most of our energy is being spent on doing the wrong things, or being spent on competition with others.
Think of somebody building a web scraper: They are spending hours or days building something whose purpose is essentially to overcome defenses created by other people. So it’s a Red Queen thing. Both parties have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
And I believe this is happening in many areas. Marketing. Government. Compliance. Software. You name it.
It’s what Hannah Arendt called work turning into labor. In other words, that which used to be the act of creating something once has turned into that which constantly needs to be repeated for the mere sake of subsistence.
The better question to ask, in my opinion, is not “Who is at fault for this?“, but “ How do I, personally, avoid wasting my own energy like that?“
But I'm afraid I don't have a better answer than that it seems to be a constant struggle. As Feynman said, "The first rule is not to fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool". It's incredibly difficult to keep yourself on track. It's just so easy to work on bullshit.
Things that never cease to blow my mind in that regard:
- Asking yourself constantly, "What am I trying to achieve here?" - Disengaging from the computer, going for a walk to lying down in the hammock. Often gives you ideas that you didn't see while you were in the "tunnel vision" of execution. - If you're waiting for result of action A so you can do action B, try if you can't do action B even without action A completed. Often, you will notice that you actually can.
Also, being conscious of the distinction between "labor" and "work" in Hannah Arendt's sense is helpful:
She defines "labor" as anything that is a recurring drain on your time and energy, and necessary to your survival. So, in a sense, it's the equivalent to a business' overhead. Eating food, mowing the lawn - these are all things that you have to do over and over again just to keep "afloat". These are also the things which do not change the future. One month from now, it just won't make much of a difference whether you mowed your lawn today or not.
In contrast, "work" in Arendt's sense is anything where you create something that did not exist before. Something that has a value in and of itself. And which, once created, will continue to exist, and will continue to add value to the future, even if you did drop dead right now. Writing a piece of software that people use. Building a lawn mowing robot. And, not to forget, teaching your kids and being a good role model to them. These are all examples of "work".
This is not to say that, when demands of "work" and "labor" collide, you should always choose the work over the labor. But you should be conscious of the difference, and take that into account when you choose what activity is going to have the greatest value to you.
This is the "keeping yourself on track" part, and the "not wasting your energy on things that do not need to get done".
The other part is the Red Queen / arms race thing. And I think one thing that might be important and useful here is to try to avoid competition (duh!). Or, at least, to be very strategic about when to engage in competition and when not to. Picking your battles, so to speak, as opposed to fighting any battle that presents itself.
I mean, one way some people get out of the rat race is to let others compete against each other. Amazon is doing that with its marketplace sellers. So not allowing yourself to become an Amazon marketplace seller would probably be a good idea. There are always these areas that are "en vogue", where there's a community about it, podcasts about it, etc.. I tend to see those things as red flags. Because if there are people there already "selling shovels", you know that the space is over-crowded. Much better to go some place no one seems to be talking about. Or even a place which, if you talk about it, people will think you're an idiot.
In investing they say, "Buy on fear, sell on greed". The same, I think, applies to choosing where to "invest" your time and energy. Any place that people avoid, do not see, or even fear likely is a much better choice. Although, just as in investing, the price you pay for the freedom from competition is uncertainty, a lack of approval from others, and not being taken seriously. Though one can slowly learn to recognize these symptoms as a sign that the path you've chosen is a good one in terms of being free from hype and competition. That's not a guarantee that it will work out for you, of course. But you're at...
>“If only the rich people...”
My comment wasn't really aimed at allocating any sort of blame or implying the rich should fix it.
>most of our energy is being spent on doing the wrong things, or being spent on competition with others.
Is it though? The fact that total wealth is increasing overall to me suggests it is an allocation issue rather than
>Both parties have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
That def is true for some areas, but not in aggregate I think.
Though frankly total wealth generated seems a little sus to me as well. How much of that is on paper?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/04/le...
I would meet a lot of people
Study and teach many things for fun
Travel wherever
Experience many different things
Play a lot
Alas, I work. I can hack it a bit by remote working and doing a 4 day work week. I have to give up playing and a studying/teaching for that.
I don’t understand how people can say that people need directions and therefore need to work. I need the exact opposite and I am sure I am not alone. I could imagine that some people need direction and therefore need to work. Not me though. I’d love to have all the free time in the world.
repeated failures makes lack of pain the goal vs. pursuing something great
Now, get off my lawn.
If you don’t, then I don’t really see the point of your comment.
The average person (in my life) is kinda waiting to die. Not suicidal but just clearly waiting for death.
One can always extend a helping hand into making society more safe, fun and better. Or at least die trying to do that. It doesn't matter how old I get, simply knowing that I can help certain people directly or do my best to advance some state of knowledge by the tiniest bit, in science or in a human being itself means to me that there's always something to do that I'd consider to be meaningful and/or even enjoyable.
Another way to put this is that every billionaire is a policy failure.
A quote that is often mentioned in this area is [1]:
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
I'm reminded of a scene from The Sting where Robert Redford and Paul Newman's character are debating whether someone they've decided to con will take the bait [2]:
> "We had him 10 years ago when he decided to be somebody."
All the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" in the US have so successfully been propagandized with that view so that Bezos can have $130B instead of $120B.
Americans should ahve more leisure time. They should have more satisfaction in life. And they should have a greater share in the properity they are fundamental in creating.
But none of that will happen until people realize that being divided on social issues is a tool used for manipulation. It's to stop working people from having class solidarity. You know who has class solidarity? Billionaires.
This isn't even a party issue. The billionaires have bought all sides.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
[2]: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/022e79f6-49e9-4dd1-b73a-7d1d130...
My feeling is that most of my coworkers felt somewhat exploited and envious, but they didn't buy into ideological propaganda. They just don't go socialist, either because they think it's hopeless, or because they want to distinguish themselves from the low-status welfare recipients just below them. It's more ideological people, like me, who absorb the propaganda and actually believe Jeff Bezos deserves it.
That's literally the same concept as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Its all class warfare and the distinction you make is useless in the grand scheme
* whether people invite you to social events
* how people treat you when you ask for help
* what kind of sex partners you have access to
* your own perception of yourself as worthy and accomplished
It's not an economic class thing, it's a social class thing and would exist even if everyone had the exact same income.
Meanwhile reaching for millionaire status when you don't really have it is stressful. Other people will push you back down and you have to fake a lot of behaviors you don't really know how to use. So people generally accept their level instead of identifying with a higher class. This is true in theory and also when you actually talk to them.
And if you thing poverty is the worst thing about the Commies just remember that people are not allowed to leave Communist countries. Think about, people who don't like America or feel "oppressed" have _always_ been free to move to a country they liked better. In USSR and the European countries occupied by it, Cuba, North Korea people were shot and survivors imprisoned for trying.
What's the acceptable minimum? Society could become like an army, with the same clothing for everybody, a small personal area to sleep and a canteen for food. Everything could be highly automated.
It's my understanding that we prefer individualism and status. The housing market with reduced interests rates has shown that people don't take the opportunity to work less. Instead, they are willing to max out what they can spend per month.
Apart from individual status, don't we want leisure time to be as low as possible to have maximum progress [1]? If it becomes acceptable to work 10 hours per week, will society stagnate because there is not enough time to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next?
[1] Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764663
No, I believe that he assumption that leisure time can't also be productive is fundamentally false. When given the opportunity to create what truly matters to people, I think we'd see some surprising results. Just look at open source, I hope to see a day that someone can dedicate the majority of their hours to open source work without having to majorly compromise their lifestyle if they so choose.
Right now, we create what those who own the capital believe to be important, there's no empirical evidence that the products I've personally worked on in my career, for example, make any meaningful effort to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Most of the software I've built probably won't be around in 20 years even, I'd be shocked if any of it is still around when I die.
We could experiment by making that available as a baseline - anyone who wants to can sleep in the flophouse, wear the durable clothes, eat the soup kitchen food.
And anyone who wants more could continue as they are.
Right now we theoretically have that, but in practice it's a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare to partake in social services, and once you fall of the Employment Train it's extremely hard to get back on unless you have connections or very valuable skills
I wonder what society would be like with a perfect safety net.. I'm kinda worried we'd end up with horrible ghettoes full of disgruntled people like the future in Judge Dredd, but I want to believe that society would adjust and we'd value connecting to other people, learning, and enriching ourselves
But consider the huge leisure industries that have grown over the past 100 years. Movies, TV, now streaming services. Radio and now Spotify and podcasts. Video games. Sports and all the media around sports. Even social media is arguably mostly entertainment these days.
Or look at active leisure. How many more cyclists and rock climbers are there today vs 100 years ago? Or skiers or runners or hikers?
Judging by the shape of the economy, there is a lot more leisure time than before. As a whole, Americans spend a lot less time growing food and making clothes and, well, surviving in general, and a lot more time doing the things above. But Americans also spend a lot more time making the things we fill our leisure time with.
I'd argue that the size of the leisure economy and the amount of leisure time are only very loosely correlated.
For example, if I meditate for 1 hour it is leisure time with no direct economic impact.
One the other hand, one could argue that the more leisure time we have, the more we will spend in leisure related equipment, culture etc.
However, one might also argue that leisure related spending correlates with disposable income, not leisure time.
You also have commutes going from walking to driving - and the first may feel leisurely but the second rarely does.
That isn't to say that it's trivial: I had to identify why I was doing it (I don't even like watching TV!), and then work on myself so that I had the mental energy to replace it with activities I find rewarding, like reading in the park or playing music.
But this sounds more like "making your leisure time fulfilling is a life skill and a mental health challenge", not "leisure time doesn't exist because we're forced to use it on certain things".
Of course, I'd work on your emotional stability first. Seriously, man: wild-eyed cursing at internet strangers for imaginary statements they didn't make is the modern equivalent of getting into a screaming match with the voices in your head. I truly wish you all the best.
If that seems a bit off, consider that a lot of people barely work at all (especially those under 25 and over 65), and those that have full time employment usually only work 5 days per week, which lowers the average hours per day considerably. So throughout an entire lifetime, I think it's true that Americans spend a lot more time on leisure and sport than on work. It just doesn't feel that way, especially when you're in prime working age.
But even full time employed parents (probably the group that perceives themselves most time starved) still spend 2.95 (mothers) to 3.52 (fathers) hours per day on Leisure and sports[2].
[1] https://www.bls.gov/tus/#tables
[2] https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a6-1317.htm
I would bet a higher percentage of people under 21 today are still in school, vs 100 years ago. School is not leisure time, but comes with leisure time.
And on the old end, Social Security and Medicare are probably allowing a higher percentage of people over 65 to enjoy a full retirement, vs 100 years ago.
What explains that?
Saying “I don’t have the time” means “I don’t have the will.”
It's a repeated stimuli, which causes your brain to filter a lot of it and discard it, leading to the feeling like a night watching TV was a night doing nothing. Your memory of watching TV blends with all memories of you watching TV, especially after a few days have passed.
You have to switch up your routine and do something new or otherwise different, and you will retain a memory of that event much more clearly and it will feel like you "did something".
My most clear memory of a night in the past week was game night where we played a physical card game. I don't remember any individual night where we watched TV.
There was an NPR “wait wait don’t tell me” episode question a couple of years back that went “most respondents in the survey said they don’t have the energy after work to do _______” what?
The answer: “anything”
2.) Specifically with Netflix, people watch Netflix while doing other things or when when they are already tired. I turn on tv or listen podcasts when cooking or cleaning or am doing other boring activities. Or when watching small children.
3.) For many people, these are evening activities and activities they use to relax - when they are actually tired. When I watch netflix or turn on game, typically it is in the evening when I am tired. I cant code, I cant read something educational or difficult, my brain is tired.
4.) There are some people who spend a lot of time on Netflix who also say they dont have time. These people pretty often are trying to say polite "no" to whatever you want them. They are trying to reject you without making you feel bad.
You don't think this counts as leisure time? Cooking while listening to music or a podcast is much more enjoyable than doing it in silence.
So what is it? I think these sorts of “idle activities” like TV and games carry with them a burden of guilt that our time could be better spent pursuing a hobby or otherwise learning something which might enrich our lives beyond the mere time we spend doing the activity.
So why do we spend all this time on idleness instead of hobby, sport, music, or other “higher leisure” activities (folk dancing?)? I think, and it’s been argued quite effectively, that work has become all-consuming in our lives even if it hasn’t taken all of our time. For many of us now, work is a mentally rather than physically taxing task. We get home from work (or log off the computer and walk out of the home office) but our minds are still at work. We think about the problems we’re trying to solve outside of work hours. Many of us are also on-call to deal with any crisis affecting the business, even after work hours or on the weekends.
We never get off work! And that’s why we have no time for leisure. Any time we have outside of active work we spend on idle activities like TV or video games so that we can drown out our chattering minds. Pursuing a quiet activity like reading or woodworking is just too difficult if we’re still thinking about work (or worse, worrying about being on-call).
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/work-labor/
Is managing one's 'personal brand' on the many social media sites leisure time?
If you're doing mundane activities that generates value for a social media company, is it leisure time? For example vetting, posting and re-posting ad copy is basically a low-level marketing job, yet a large percentage of the population say that they spend hours a day doing this.
What percentage of our 'leisure time' is spent watching or listening to ads? Is that truly leisure?
I guess the argument goes that we choose if and when to do these things - I wonder how much people really feel like they have a choice in the matter anymore.
Everyone needs to eat, so getting/preparing food is work in some sense. There’s a hobby/leisure component too though: you definitely don’t need to spend two hours every day cooking a perfect coq au vin or visiting farm stands to find the tastiest, most interesting produce. On the gripping hand, doing the absolute bare minimum (Soylent or pot noodles or whatever) might be okay for a little while, but many people don’t find it physically or mentally sufficient for the long term either.
They still do. They always did. It’s just so that now you are the proletariat.
I mean, how can we really consider ourselves being the proletariat when our clothes are sewed by children in Pakistan?
— Spock, Star Trek, season 2, eposode 17, Wolf in the Fold (1967)
To be explicit, I don’t think individual consumption explains the whole story (e.g. inequality and wealth distribution) but normalizing for it paints a clearer picture.
The simplest example that we can relate to may be email. Before email, writing letters was awful. You got out a nice pen and paper and whiteout, and carefully wrote in your best penmanship a few pages to your grandmother thanking her for a nice new pair of socks. You did this twice a year. Now we have email, and the whole family sends low-effort messages and photos every day. Nobody would have guessed that this was any sort of need, but you do need to do it because family inclusion and affection is now competitive and that is a basic need.
Almost nothing we are spending our time on right now would be considered a need even 50 years ago, but most of it is spent trying to satisfy a need that was easy for them. Much of that is spent “working”, which is mostly now just wasted time and miserable interactions under artificial stress and unending hours. That makes people feel awful, and ruins any leisure time they might have had.
Any by the way, some people here are saying that rich people have leisure on the backs of the working class. Just look at their families. They’re not healthy, nor happy. They are scared to death in every moment of losing everything, and they can’t trust anybody. Don’t envy them. It may look like leisure but it doesn’t feel like it.
You could also consider the FIRE people to be leisure rich - often at even lower total assets. Paid off house, modest investments, even more modest expenses.