I think Americans extol work for its own sake in a rather unhealthy way. I also think "hard work" is presented as a panacea for a host of problems, including poverty, despite the fact that many poor people break their backs toiling all their lives without meaningfully climbing the social ladder. "Just work hard" is actually profoundly unhelpful advice, without specific strategies and acknowledgements of all the systemic forces that give some people a leg up (and hold many others back).
Contrary to the rhetoric of the anti-work movement, I think work is bound up in self-expression, and to meaningfully contribute to the creation of something beneficial to others or to yourself is a deep human longing. I just think that we speak of work in a very crude and superficial way here in the US.
I feel the trick with this heuristic is that it is only measurable post hoc. It could be argued that things don't have value until they exist[0], which takes work. And plenty of things aren't valuable, until they are.
So in that light, it's about oracle, or luck, directing your hard work towards efficacy.
"Work Hard" is the only advice you can give without perfect knowledge of the future. We usually just leave out the depressing second half of the aphorism: "but sometimes it won't matter."
[0] I can hear the entire finance industry starting to interject all at once
And if the work you did is not "valuable", at the end of it, it is by definition not smart? Or does some smart work go unrewarded?
And by complement then, does some un-smart work get rewarded?
If I flip a coin and say, "it will come up heads", was the act of flipping "working smart", when it does? Is it feckless hard work when I get tails instead?
I think your view doesn’t consider that we can make informed estimates for the future, with plans specifically for if we’re wrong.
I can choose which programming languages and other technical skills I learn based on current use, as well as estimates for their future. I could become an expert in the wrong JavaScript framework, but learning Typescript and React is far more likely to be valuable than learning to be a telegraph repairman.
You're not wrong! There's plenty of ways to constrain the hypothesis-space of the future. They do tend to be very bad at accounting for rapidly changing contexts.
But beyond that, I think the conversation here is around output being sacred. By the definition of "value" I think we're all sort of taking as implicit here, Facebook would be just as valuable over telegram as it is over the internet.
Obviously that's ludicrous in its particulars, but I just mean to say that the "value" doesn't necessarily correlate with the tools used to produce it in this context. It's not the craftsmanship that's "rewarded", it's the sale.
Maybe sometimes you can sell better if you're invested in better tools, but I could work for a decade on a completely novel and beautifully crafted and executed widget that absolutely no one wants.
My point is that working smart involves predicting and then frequently validating that what you’re producing has value.
The upstream conversation centers on individual workers and how much they get paid for their labor. Learning in demand skills likely to stand the test of time will get a worker higher pay, due to employers needing those skills to produce value for their customers. This also means the worker keeps track of what skills are desired, and acts accordingly if things change.
In the case of someone working for a decade on something novel, but ultimately unwanted, there are still many ways to work smart. Did they try to validate their idea with a test audience? Could they have built a lesser featured minimal viable product in half the time, to test if it has value? Did they properly plan resource allocation, in both time and money? Or did they burn everything they had, well past their original plan?
I agree that “working smart” is not a foolproof way to achieve success, but the conversation up the thread focused solely on luck.
> This is because it's about working effectively, i.e. getting things done.
It's about getting things done if you're a business. If you're an employee, and your goal is to have money to afford a nice life, it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.
If you want to get ahead in your career or financially - the WORST thing you can do is mindlessly do a good job at what you're told to do or what you think (after spending much effort) is the best use of your time.
It's about very specifically checking the boxes that get your more pay or moving up in your career or whatever it is you're after.
Selling your labor for money is just another kind of business.
> it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.
Businesses that pay people who don't provide value are soon to go out of business.
Tossing a five gallon jug on your shoulder and running up and down a flight of stairs for hours is REALLY hard work. And yet you don't see people take this on as a job and then complain about it.
So instead someone goes out and gets an entry-level position. The options are limited, because they have no skills. The problem now is they never invest in building skills, so they are stuck in shit-tier jobs forever.
I want to have some empathy for this. But if I go to a convenience store and somehow it takes the cashier 10 minutes to checkout 3 people, that empathy becomes hard to find.
At the end of the day, every person getting a paycheck needs to produce more value to the business than they get paid. The only other way is to tax people who DO actually contribute and spread the money around. There are some serious concerns of fairness about that.
Too many people believe in the labor theory of value, meaning one should get paid according to how hard and long one works. This theory is a false god, because employers do not care how long or hard you work, they only care about the value produced.
Being smart means applying your efforts at producing value, and finding ways to produce more value.
They're all false gods. Chicago economics are just as much of a demiurge as any model that includes "just" or distributional reward. It mostly comes down to whom god favors.
Do you believe that most hard workers don't believe they are applying their efforts towards producing value? Do you believe that everyone who receives reward for producing value , did?
I fully understand the narrative of the Free Market. The question isn't what it does; the question is how, and at what cost.
It works to what end? For whom? Certainly for some individuals, but does it work for them by the rules of its own narrative? For some concept of "Humanity"? Maybe, but I'm not sure the apparent demographic distributions at play here resemble "Humanity" in any meaningful statistical sense.
In fact, any surplus value from labor you are not pocketing/delivering to your shareholders is value left on the table and makes you a bad exec. Thus, the proper way to do it is to minimize the information your workers get, keep them hungry/afraid/without fallback medical care, and make sure they have no other option but to break their back for you.
Two thoughts: 1) is that hard work is not the solution but rather largely a prerequisite to solving host of problems (I.e. getting out of poverty is dependent on a host of factors but if one isn’t willing to work hard, your chances are much slimmer)
2) your points about self identity being intertwined with work is an important one, and something I struggle with quite a bit.
Not an American, just a human being, but I was not brought into this world to work for 60 years in a job I only tolerate and then die. Forget that. That idea makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it. I am a human being and I am capable of so much more than I can even imagine. We all are. It’s a shame so much of us are forced to spend the best parts of our lives chained to a desk.
These kind of comments are so heartbreaking. Is this really what you think humans are without work? You think people would just resort to hedonism, and addiction if not for corporations who kindly introduce order in our lives? When I look at humanity I see art, science, passion, inspiration, admiration and curiosity. If people didn't have to work 60 hours a week, they would be artists, parents, lovers, researchers etc... I'm truly, truly sad that not all of believe in this.
I deeply apologize for this possibly snarky, irrelevant comment, maybe it shouldn't be allowed. I just wanted to offer my perspective.
There's a famous story about a man who dies, and wakes up in a place, where a servant appears and says he can have anything he wants, anything. He just has to ask.
After some time with this, the man grows bored. He complains to the servant, saying heaven is not interesting. The servant replies that he's not in heaven.
On the other hand, people often die shortly after retiring. It's because we have evolved to struggle. Leading a life of indolence and sloth is not healthy for the body or mind.
Yes, the kind of “work” that they were interested in. That they did because they enjoyed, not because they need a roof over their heads or progress in a rat race.
This kind of “work” wasn’t done with a primary goal of getting money. Dare I say, it was a “hobby”.
It is entirely possible to have a job that you enjoy and get paid for. Most of the jobs I've had I enjoyed very much and was paid well for them. And yeah, I needed the money to put a roof over my head, too.
If you hate your job, think about upgrading your job skills to get a job that you would like.
I tried having jobs that I was interested in when I was young, but making it my job made me hate it. So I've spent the last 20 years working in IT because I dislike computers, and always have, except a few years when I was 13-15. There is no loss if working makes me hate something I already dislike--but if it was something I love, and work made me hate it, then it would be tragic.
The point (for me) is its the moment you make it a job, it becomes drudgery. so the "job" part is what I would need to avoid.
A) Have you ever read the E-Myth revisited. In it, deeeeeeeep inside the BS, there is a valuable point about not mistaking the fact of being good at doing a thing with being good at running a business that does that same thing.
B) My point was that it wasn't really work, hence the quotes. The leisure/aristocracy of the past did need to turn it into work. They simply did it because they liked it.
That's a lousy, stupid excuse for the fact that an "efficient" system based on universalizing toil in a social-Darwinian struggle for survival allowed for a leisure class.
People often die shortly after retiring partially because of a lifetime where they could've been able to maintain their health and hobbies and lifestyle that allowed for workless living, except work demanded the majority if one's waking hours...
is it explained by the intuition that people who are about to die from various frailties first find that they are too frail to work and thus retire? (no part of which i am moralizing about, just seems to make sense)
There's a lot of ageism in professional white collar hiring. In addition, blue collar work literally wears down your body until chronic pain sets in and you can no longer provide a business owner value.
Everyone ages differently, and if you're not spry and productive as you age you'll be pushed out regardless of if you can retire.
You know, that’s perhaps because they retired when they simply could not continue working. Perhaps they might have retired before dropping dead if that was an option.
I think the important question is: are you okay with significantly lower wealth / quality of life, or are you saying "I don't want to work so hard (but somebody else should, because I sure do like all the things we have in this society)"?
I don't think it's an either/or situation if we sit down and really think about it. If those employed in fields that are ostensibly rent-seeking were to do something that wasn't a net negative on the economy, maybe we'd be able to share the burden a little more fairly.
Yeah, but probably not. Very few people want a humble shelter and 2000kcal a day. Most want large apartments, entertainment, restaurants, travel, hotels, social media sites to discuss articles about 'workism' etc etc. And somebody has to build and run all those things so they can enjoy them.
The hermits going to Alaska with an axe, a saw, and a dream to build a small cabin and live off the land and watch the bears catch salmon, those are certainly ready to make that trade. But your average Western academic talking about work-life-balance? I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility, but it'd be a first.
> Most want large apartments, entertainment, restaurants, travel, hotels, social media sites to discuss articles about 'workism' etc etc. And somebody has to build and run all those things so they can enjoy them.
One solid income used to buy an entire house. Why can't I want to work less and still have a large apartment? And that's without even considering productivity gains.
People can budget for entertainment without long work weeks.
I don't demand much in terms of restaurants and travel and hotels, shrug.
Websites are not expensive to run, and the cost of social media if directly paid for would be single digit dollars a month. Negligible in terms of someone's entire budget.
There's no reason to believe that we'd be more efficient if we worked less. People working part-time don't become more efficient, they just work less.
Which is understandable, and that choice should be theirs to make -- if they accept that it has a direct impact on everything they get, and don't rely on others working more to compensate for them working less.
The ugly bit is that so many of us are engaged in work that is, at best, zero-sum economically. My sister got promoted into some mid-level compliance/oversight role (allegedly). They'd spend all day rewriting existing policies because the department has the budget for it and needs to spend it to justify it. She was paid very well but bailed as soon as she could. Personally, I'd rather work as a grocery store clerk or something. At least I can look at the nice clean space with people able to find what they want to buy and know it's of some value to humanity.
That argument is a bit of a canard. Wages haven't kept up with inflation for many years yet the rich are getting richer. And we're supposed to maintain our motivation to "benefit society" or whatever.
Well it's been like this since the dawn of humanity. The whole expulsion of Adam and Eve from Garden of Eden story.
" in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken;"
> Well it's been like this since the dawn of humanity.
I mean - hunter gatherer societies usually had all their food gathering and chores done in just a few hours a day. Spending the rest of their time doing all those things humans like to do.
Ok, no one is stopping you from starting your own business and doing whatever you want. Also not everyone is capable of everything, if you're short you're not going to be in the NBA...
It seems like you were in fact brought into this world with the expectation that you make your own way and provide for yourself. Unless it’s your expectation that others do that for you or your parents have already provided for you
3) if all billionaires in the US liquidated absolutely all personal wealth and evenly distributed it, what would happen?
720 billionaires * 10B average wealth / 300M US population = 24k USD per person 1 time payment
Covid stimulus was like, 9k ish depending on your bracketing? So just imagine 2 or 3 covid payments. The conclusion should be that it's not going to change the fabric of how life in America functions. It's certainly not gonna grant GP commenter the ability to chill and paint for the rest of their lives.
How’s that work though? The billionaires wealth is mostly corporate wealth so that’s already included. Unless you are advocating expropriating corporate wealth from retail shareholders, public pension funds, and foreign owners?!
I really like this comment because it says the quiet part out loud (like an unintended hot mic), the expectation that folks are going to kick out kids and it's entirely on the kids, existing through no choice of their own, to be subjected to a system that is built to extract from them decades of output until they're able to retire (if at all) or die.
"It is this way, has been this way, and you will like it or leave." With that said, it should come as no shock when various rejections of this idea take hold. How could one rationalize not attempting to critically re-evaluate the situation? What is all this progress for?
I can't imagine why the birth rate is falling in certain places so precipitously. /s We tell parents they should have expensive kids for the good of society. We tell kids they have to grow up and support themselves over a lifetime because that's the deal.
You can critically re-evaluate until the cows come home. Won't materially change anything.
I miss old school labor, or at least how they're described in the history books. Forcefully changing things for the better. Now we have a bunch of people critically evaluating everything on social media, expecting things to change as if they asked to speak with society's manager, expecting them to fix it.
We've been "chained to our desks" for all of our humanity till very recently. There was not time in which a common person did not have to do drudgery to get on with life. So it is a luxury and a privilege to not have to. But it is still a historical exception. I will grant you that there were some low seasons, in some places where the pace abated. But remember, at sundown, things stopped. You had to do whatever it was you did while there was sunlight. Fire was mostly for cooking.
Cynically, people don't want to be liberated, people want to be better than the neighbor they don't like, to have what they have, and to have what they don't have, and that gets them through day to day
I somewhat agree with you, but if anything, the pandemic has highlighted that people need purpose, else they while away their time and do unproductive stuff. They don't pursue their passions and become a maker or artist or artisan, no, they get on TikTok or some MMORPG or whatever strikes their LARPing fancy. Very few take the opportunity to "cultivate' themselves.
If you give a starving person a three-star michelin dinner, I don't think they would appreciate it properly. You need to be well-fed to appreciate the subtlety and the beauty of the meal. Similarly, people who don't have much free time may waste what little free time they get -- only when they have enough might they be able to figure out how to "properly" enjoy it.
If I have no passion to be a marker or an artist or an artisan, is any luxury time I have wasted because I'm not 'cultivating' myself? Isn't that what I get to decide? Also, can we considering the middle of a pandemic a valid test case? We were all told to stay home - most people weren't about to go take a pottery class.
There may be some who disgree with your view, but let's assume most people want the 'ultimate' goal of being 'liberated' from work in order to 'live more'.
However, that's a wildly simplistic view of things.
You can't just say this without realizing that there are severe drawbacks to this. We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living, all the benefits of our times, maintain scientific progress, maintain national security and many, many others.
The ultimate goal should maybe be productivity, and if 4h is better than 8h for whatever reason, then let's do that. But it's definitely not so simple.
Absolutely not. Do you think we’d use resources more effectively by cutting our hours?
Maybe the global maxima is not the standard 9-5 work day, that’s almost a given, but to claim that working dramatically less will yield better results is absurd.
This statement is at best grossly incomplete. There is plenty of research to suggest that hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than civilized people. E.g: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0614-6
> There was not time in which a common person did not have to do drudgery to get on with life.
Is hunting drudgery? Are epic food-gathering missions? Creating new towns and villages?
Exactly. There are vast quantities of uninhabited areas of Yakutia. People could return to being hunter-gatherers and enjoy all its, uhhhm, trappings and live a happy, fulfilling life! But you know what, except for a very few, no one else will want to do it. Ask any random American, or ask any random want-to-be immigrant, hey there, there is this great big opportunity for you and your family to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle; are you up for that, it'll free you from the chains of modernity; Believe me, it's very leisurely!
So what you're saying is that before the invention of the lamp, people had respite from work. Worker productivity has increased enormously in the last 100 years. My job entails putting good people out of work through analysis and design of more efficient (read: automated) workflows. At what point do we realize that we have to let go the "work hard every day until you die because that's the way may grandparents lived" ethic?
Sorry but your ancestors were regularly getting eaten alive by wild animals a few generations back (heck it's still an existential threat to some people). People had to resort to canibalism to survive famines. Plague, TB, polio. Just a hundred years ago there was ~1 in 100 chance a woman would die during childbirth. >40% of kids would not live to age of 5 in 1800s
The only reason you were brought into this world is because your ancestors went through shit you can't even imagine, had children, some of which survived to eventually have you.
I think a lot of us would agree we’d get more fulfillment with fighting off those wild animals and going through through that shit than cranking out Jira tickets and moving them between columns.
If this is true then living through hardship is still possible. There are places in the world with very low living standards and it's possible to move and live there. The military still exists. Working long shifts and living in man camps at the fringes of the developed world still exists.
I've done this thought exercise many times, traveled extensively, and continue trying different types of work. The truth is that most of us (HN users) have pretty comfortable lives and would be making huge quality of life sacrifices to live the dream of the romanticized past.
There is definitely something to sort out around "what does the high paid knowledge worker do when they no longer have hardship defining their life for them" but I don't know if artificially handicapping yourself and LARPing struggle is the answer.
If you do find the answer then please let me know.
I think the biggest error is mistaking comfort for happiness.
If you aren't happy in your current position you have two choices. You either choose to solve the problem and start taking steps, or you choose to be distracted from the problem.
I know the best times of my life is when I got outside of my comfort zone.
Can you articulate the attitude you're reacting against? Because you don't appear to be addressing the OP, who never made a claim about their ancestors having a tough go of it.
> I was not brought into this world to work for 60 years in a job [...] It’s a shame so much of us are forced to spend the best parts of our lives chained to a desk.
Our ancestors would kill for the ability to replace their existence by a desk job.
Many of our ancestors killed other ancestors because there wasn't enough resources | food | land | conquest
Man of our ancestors didn't survive the winter, or the plague, or slavery...that doesn't mean I want or necessarily need to wear my self out for someone else's portfolio.
I've had years where I was only present the last 5 minutes before passing out each night. the other 23:55 of the day spent in a mad rush, eat/sleep/work/repeat.
That's nothing to be proud of, especially if you don't have to.
Are you saying the only two conceivable states for humanity to be in is 1. to be chased by sabre tooth tigers and dying of polio or 2. slaving away in an Amazon warehouse, the only imaginable sanctuary from wild beasts?
I have to admit that's a new one when it comes to defending the status quo of our work culture
As you go back through the ages life gets worse. The implication is that life in the present is supposed to be the best possible life. Consequently there is nothing wrong with trying to optimize it to be even better that it is right now. That's literally the purpose of being here, especially if you have children.
Stating that life should be hard now because your ancestors had it worse is completely missing the point. They all strived to make life better for their progeny. We need to be doing the same. That means refusing to accept things being worse than necessary.
Phrasing it as "I was not brought into this world for" - is entitlement by birth which I find ridiculous.
I have nothing against wanting to improve your condition or striving for better - but expecting something just because you were born or a human - really needs some reality checking.
Also your notion that human condition constantly improves through history is not a given - things can very much regress and humanity can disappear.
It's very probable that your highest contribution to society is 9-5 and supporting >2 kids - but it's not very popular to say that I guess.
Which life is better on the whole? That of an apex predator in its natural environment or that of livestock?
There is a case to be made that modern humans have been progressively turned into domesticated livestock, abstracted from their ancestral, natural habitat since the neolithic revolution.
It is unclear that cell phones and modern medicine increase net happiness when many work soul sucking, unhealthy sedentary jobs and suffer a long gray existence in nursing homes and hospitals.
So what? My ancestors survived that means I should be happy spending half my waking life doing meaningless labor for a faceless corporation to feed and shelter myself.
Justify wasting your life however you want but calling those who don't agree with your cope "delusional" is rich.
People in the past also had a fun and also seeked meaning. They were also seeking relationships and socialization. Some were rich and led iddle lifestyle and yes some were slaves.
However, the basic human "I don't want more then this" was present in all of them.
It is nit like everyone in history was simultaneously subject of famine, tuberculosis and then died in childbirth.
> Sorry but your ancestors were regularly getting eaten alive by wild animals a few generations back (heck it's still an existential threat to some people). People had to resort to canibalism to survive famines. Plague, TB, polio. Just a hundred years ago there was ~1 in 100 chance a woman would die during childbirth. >40% of kids would not live to age of 5 in 1800s
I'm not sure how this counters the idea that we should not dedicate our lives to menial jobs. It seems kind of unrelated.
> That attitude is so delusional it's hilarious.
I wish we turned down the snark a little bit at HN.
What's the connection between our ancestors' collective success and advancement, and our present-day, individual suffering?
We are here because the human race improved itself, its conditions, to lessen and adapt to environmental limitations and even our own political issues. Not because we worked 50 hour weeks in dead end jobs.
This is what we in Germany call "whining on a high level".
The universe doesn't owe you a life of leasure and following your passions and lofty ideals. It doesn't even owe you a life free of starvation and debiliating sickness, yet that is what you and far, far more people today have, compared to pretty much any time in the past.
A 5 day work week of 40 hours desk work is very light compared to what people 100 or 200 years ago had. Labor unions fought very hard for it. There's memes about medieval peasants working only 150 days a year, but those are bullshit (that is the work they had to do for someone else before they could start to make their own food and necessities). Allegedly, hunter-gatherer societies really did a lot less of what could be called work, but often had to compete violently for hunting grounds or face starvation, and didn't have all that much opportunity to test their creative capabilities either.
If you want to show that you're capable of so much more, go ahead and find a way to do it. I can pretty much promise you that it will involve working more, not less.
Or if you want to fix inequality so that everyone has to work less to make a living, fine, very commendable, I totally agree that is a desirable outcome. But I can also guarantee that people will still have work, and not that much less than now.
If you want a better life, find a specific and achievable way in which it can be better, and work towards that. Quite possibly involving a labor union.
But don't moan poetically about how it's such a shame having to work for your living.
Interesting how this comment really brought out the "just be grateful you don't have to deal with the horrible things people did in the past" replies.
A reminder: the people in the past who went through these things and strived for something more (like the above commenter) are a big part of the reason we have it so easy today.
> A reminder: the people in the past who went through these things and strived for something more (like the above commenter) are a big part of the reason we have it so easy today.
Agreed. Advancements happen because someone somewhere was dissatisfied with the status quo. It's a prerequisite.
>I am a human being and I am capable of so much more than I can even imagine. We all are. It’s a shame so much of us are forced to spend the best parts of our lives chained to a desk.
No one's forcing you to do anything. Do all that "so much more".
The problem is then you might want food and shelter and goods and medicine - the results of other's labor. To get that you will have to provide them things of value, i.e., the result of your labor in some form.
If you can do "so much more" then do it and trade for the other things you cannot make.
The reality is that to produce things others want so you can trade for things you want takes work, and that work is not simply having all the fun you feel like every moment.
You sure sound like one, by the level of entitlement ;)
So I take it you provide your own food, build your own home, and do your own healthcare; or find volunteers who love their jobs to do them for you? I hear farming wheat, putting up drywall and examining rashes are jobs that people "only tolerate", it's not generally a calling.
> I am a human being and I am capable of so much more than I can even imagine
Do you happen to be capable of anything useful to other people, as defined by other people themselves? If yes, is it as part of a job you only tolerate, or as part of "so much more"?
> In 2019, I called this phenomenon “workism.” In a time of declining religiosity, rich Americans seemed to turn to their career to fill the spiritual vacuum at the center of their life. For better or (very often) for worse, their desk had become their altar.
I find this a very strange idea, and I think it's mostly formed by looking at something without understanding it. The people's motivation the author finds is "they've replaced religion with work". Why isn't it more practical: there's a lot of stuff to do and they want it done, so they do it?
Maybe it's just a divide where neither side understands the other, but I've never understood people who see a big task they want done and don't sink their teeth into it and work hard to get it done. I guess on Orwell's Animal Farm, there's Boxer and there's Napoleon, and Napoleon wonders why Boxer works so hard.
> there's a lot of stuff to do and they want it done, so they do it?
Why they do it though? What's this deep longing that causes them to be more productive instead of, you know, enjoying life?
There will always be lots to be done, and the more that is done the more work will be created to be done on top. I do agree with the point that losing some sense of spirituality (not necessarily a religious/supernatural one) has removed at least one facet of facing life as a human.
Doing work for the sake of feeling accomplished by completing a task seems very meaningless when you are aware you only have one life to experience whatever your soul will be able to, digging your teeth into an endless stream of stuff to do don't really aggrandise your soul, it just makes you a more efficient little human machine.
Why do people in (at least some) poor countries work more (not necessarily more productive for lack of machinery etc, but certainly more) than those in rich countries? I believe because they need to do more to survive or increase their quality of life.
I'm convinced that there are many things that need just raw manpower thrown at them to make society run as well as it does, and if we all did what in Germany is called "Dienst nach Vorschrift" (aka only do the minimum contractually required), we'd quickly end up with things falling apart. To me it roughly boils down to Kant: act in a way that could be made into law. To prioritize ones leisure and comfort over the needs of society doesn't feel like something we could make into law and still keep being a society.
> Why do people in (at least some) poor countries work more (not necessarily more productive for lack of machinery etc, but certainly more) than those in rich countries? I believe because they need to do more to survive or increase their quality of life.
I'm originally from one of these poorer countries. People do work longer because of survival, because if they don't work as long someone else will and given the lack of employment it become a cutthroat environment for survival of the one willing to sacrifice more, the bosses exploit that even further by dangling the guillotine all the time, "work longer or I will find someone that will". This isn't beneficial to a society, at all.
It's a system of oppression.
> I'm convinced that there are many things that need just raw manpower thrown at them to make society run as well as it does
And we are constantly working to automate or create machinery that makes those more efficient, requiring less manpower when labour gets more expensive. The whole goal should be to work less, not more, work smarter and more efficiently so it requires less hours of someone's life to perform a necessary job for society.
Prioritising one's leisure and free time should be the main driver to work smarter, I've seen so many human lives being wasted away in bullshit jobs and inefficient work at my home country that I wouldn't ever propose that work by itself should be prioritised, workers are not the ones gaining the most out of their work and while this system is in place it will be an eternal struggle between being a servant to some capitalist because you depend on that for survival and living your life to the fullest. I prefer to prioritise my life over someone's else bullshit vision for how to accumulate more capital.
If you are going the Kantian way, this could be made into law: benefits and gains of a worker's work should be directed to other workers, to invest in whatever is needed for workers having to work less.
So I'd say I'm much more into Bertrand Russell's philosophy camp on this topic.
That's my point. It's not just because of oppression (but certainly can be), you'll see the same in subsistence farmers. They don't do a 9-5 with a 1 hour lunch break and frequent chats with colleagues, they toil away because they have their work cut out for them and when whoever does the cutting did it, they took them to be much bigger than they are and cut them a large piece.
I agree with you: we should work less and smarter. But society needs to be kept upright, and too many people are deciding not to work (or to work against it), and then it quickly becomes a game of chicken where those who care the most/can stand the situation the least will pick up the slack.
I'm pretty sure that most advances in productivity will be eaten by growing desires. We have plenty enough to get everyone 20sqm/2000kcal but now we want 70sqm and exotic foods during local winter, and we want to travel the world etc etc.
I’m not really a big fan of the “Star Trek” utopia where everyone seems to sit around painting and cooking soul food either. Been to New York City lately? We’re only 50% remote work and the entire city smells like pot around the clock. The first thing I notice when I travel out of the city is the lack of pot smell. So apparently the future is mostly getting baked and surfing Pornhub in 8K HDR on a 65” tv in full view of everyone (the apts here don’t come with window coverings so facing the tv instead of the window is the most modesty you can hope for a lot of the time).
Some people need to be given a purpose because otherwise they don’t have one. There is a lot of middle ground between the two extremes of total work and no work.
Retail Marijuana sales have only just started in NYC around the same time as remote work, plus outdoor smoking was legalized barely a year ago, so that might be a factor to the increased prevalence of of smelling Dank in the City. Beats hotboxing your apartment or car.
No opinion on your overall point (my gut feeling is that some type of steady work is net good for society as a whole)
Your evidence is ridiculous. I'm frequently out and about in NYC and I can smell pot every once in a while but not "constantly". I would also imagine that the # of folks smoking pot during work hours is minimal and I don't see an issue with it if you aren't on the clock.
I have never seen porn through someones window either lol. Also most people install window coverings.
I'm out and about every day in Manhattan, uptown, downtown, and in between. And every day I smell pot multiple times per day. It is positively ubiquitous and disgusting.
I think what’s being observed here is a sort of whiplash, not dissimilar to how a teenager whose upbringing has been extremely restrictive will likely go hog wild the second they’re no longer subject to their parents’ rules.
If one were born into a Star Trek utopia and never had most of their spark of creativity/curiosity extinguished by a school system designed to pump out worker drones and never had the majority of their waking hours sold off just to exist, I believe they’d be a lot less likely to be a couch potato. There’s no reason the go nuts with burning personal time with “junk food” recreation when personal time has never been at a shortage.
> Some people need to be given a purpose because otherwise they don’t have one. There is a lot of middle ground between the two extremes of total work and no work.
I would argue we are currently at the working constantly extreme and hopefully moving toward a better balance. Cooking soul food is still work that needs to get done. It would be nice to have a little more time each day to cook a proper meal and to have time for more purposeful driven work.
I worked at a 60-hour-a-week-average job and the attitude of 'that was last week, what have you done for me this week' followed by being RIFed the second the spreadsheet told them to...
Life's too short. I've lost two of 4 parents and working more hours aren't going to bring them back.
Hey guys turns out I actually enjoy the satisfaction I get from working. I certainly value spending the afternoon working leaves me happier at bedtime than if I watched YouTube or whatever.
It’s anecdotal but I have been feeling a sense of a war on work as of lately.
It's interesting the comments here are about (a) dead-end jobs where they don't care about you (b) poverty and such (c) jobs one only tolerates vs self-realization.
The article however is about the upper-middle class men. So, these arguments are really irrelevant to them (except maybe the caring bit, but I doubt career-oriented people are unaware of how little companies care about them - they can, after all switch, companies). In tech, I've met tons of people who work a lot because they like it and people who could have obviously retired (startup exits) but keep working anyway, in not-so-glamorous jobs, some even as ICs with all the attendant BS.
Apparently less people identify with work and want to work, for a reason that Atlantic fails to tease out. Atlantic claims it's better this way but I'm not so sure. Better for whom? I'm not even certain it's better for the upper-middle class men themselves - would they get some better ways to self-actualize instead? Not a given. It's unlikely better for the economy, or for anyone else really.
Everyone has different preferences. Based on those they get different outcomes.
I actually have also met, and read on HN tons of people in tech who kinda resent people who work a lot because it makes them look bad. But many cannot admit this to others (or themselves) so they invent all kinds of justifications about how it's bad for people to work hard for an uncaring company not being a founder, or how it's better to have kids or go surfing and be a balanced person, or whatever. And really this outcome of getting more done is bad and maybe even fake and they are not better than me!
It's like the books about athletes, where they always emphasize that people who realize their genetic potential are the ones who love the grind and train a ton in a structured way (practicing serves, reading chess books, doing drills, whatever it is). If you don't like the boring repetitive training, and don't force yourself, you won't get as good. Then you can either say "well, I am not as good at training so I'm not going to get good at this sport, it's my fault only, and that's ok". Or you can come up with some excuses or devalue others' outcomes.
This article is just the latter "oh I was too lazy to practice serves so I never got good at tennis, but all those tennis players kept practicing even after making a bunch of money. Well now they are stopping and it makes me feel better, so I conclude it's better for society"
> Everyone has different preferences. Based on those they get different outcomes. I actually have also met, and read on HN tons of people in tech who kinda resent people who work a lot because it makes them look bad.
The reason people resent folk who work crazy hard isn't because it makes them look bad (though it's probably factor to an extent). It's because that that preference has become the default for the whole of society in the West. The article points out that both policy in the US and social norms/values have become highly preferenced towards those who work crazy hard. The point isn't that it's bad for certain individuals to value work over everything else, it's that it's bad for society as a whole.
As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised. And despite the rhetoric here it's perfectly possible to value work and work hard without it being your top priority in life.
> The article points out that both policy in the US and social norms/values have become highly preferenced towards those who work crazy hard. The point isn't that it's bad for certain individuals to value work over everything else, it's that it's bad for society as a whole.
Why is it bad specifically?
> As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised
Imagine you want to remodel your bathroom. Or, also, imagine you have a bad water leak in your bathroom - after all, on-call is one of the major things people in tech complain about with regard to work-life balance. You call up two otherwise similar plumbers, and one tells you that he can be there ASAP to fix your leak, and he'll do the plumbing for the remodel in 2 visits next week. The other is a balanced person so he won't fix your leak until Monday, and he doesn't like to work for a long stretch of time, so the remodel's gonna take 4 visits, sometime next month. Cost's the same, so you hire the 1st plumber. How would you feel if the 2nd one calls you back and complains he's unfairly "being penalised for his preferences"?
That's the thing. Everyone (ok, most people) would prefer to hire (or work with) a workaholic, other things being equal. But in abstract, some mysterious "society" should apparently prefer otherwise.
I find it interesting that all the comments here seem to view the options as "prioritise work/career first and work as hard as possibly can" and "don't prioritise work/career at all and do as little as you can get away with". The article criticises the influence that former view is having on western society but it's not advocating for the latter as far as I can see. It's perfectly possible to value your career and work hard without putting it above everything else.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadContrary to the rhetoric of the anti-work movement, I think work is bound up in self-expression, and to meaningfully contribute to the creation of something beneficial to others or to yourself is a deep human longing. I just think that we speak of work in a very crude and superficial way here in the US.
This is because it's about working effectively, i.e. getting things done. Working hard doing things that have little to no value is a waste of effort.
So in that light, it's about oracle, or luck, directing your hard work towards efficacy.
"Work Hard" is the only advice you can give without perfect knowledge of the future. We usually just leave out the depressing second half of the aphorism: "but sometimes it won't matter."
[0] I can hear the entire finance industry starting to interject all at once
You are correct that nothing is guaranteed. Now reconcile that with your position. What is "smart work" in light of risk?
Just what I said. Do things that create value.
And by complement then, does some un-smart work get rewarded?
If I flip a coin and say, "it will come up heads", was the act of flipping "working smart", when it does? Is it feckless hard work when I get tails instead?
I can choose which programming languages and other technical skills I learn based on current use, as well as estimates for their future. I could become an expert in the wrong JavaScript framework, but learning Typescript and React is far more likely to be valuable than learning to be a telegraph repairman.
But beyond that, I think the conversation here is around output being sacred. By the definition of "value" I think we're all sort of taking as implicit here, Facebook would be just as valuable over telegram as it is over the internet.
Obviously that's ludicrous in its particulars, but I just mean to say that the "value" doesn't necessarily correlate with the tools used to produce it in this context. It's not the craftsmanship that's "rewarded", it's the sale.
Maybe sometimes you can sell better if you're invested in better tools, but I could work for a decade on a completely novel and beautifully crafted and executed widget that absolutely no one wants.
The upstream conversation centers on individual workers and how much they get paid for their labor. Learning in demand skills likely to stand the test of time will get a worker higher pay, due to employers needing those skills to produce value for their customers. This also means the worker keeps track of what skills are desired, and acts accordingly if things change.
In the case of someone working for a decade on something novel, but ultimately unwanted, there are still many ways to work smart. Did they try to validate their idea with a test audience? Could they have built a lesser featured minimal viable product in half the time, to test if it has value? Did they properly plan resource allocation, in both time and money? Or did they burn everything they had, well past their original plan?
I agree that “working smart” is not a foolproof way to achieve success, but the conversation up the thread focused solely on luck.
It's about getting things done if you're a business. If you're an employee, and your goal is to have money to afford a nice life, it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.
If you want to get ahead in your career or financially - the WORST thing you can do is mindlessly do a good job at what you're told to do or what you think (after spending much effort) is the best use of your time.
It's about very specifically checking the boxes that get your more pay or moving up in your career or whatever it is you're after.
> it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.
Businesses that pay people who don't provide value are soon to go out of business.
Beg to differ. Nobody does this better than Fortune 500 companies.
Tossing a five gallon jug on your shoulder and running up and down a flight of stairs for hours is REALLY hard work. And yet you don't see people take this on as a job and then complain about it.
So instead someone goes out and gets an entry-level position. The options are limited, because they have no skills. The problem now is they never invest in building skills, so they are stuck in shit-tier jobs forever.
I want to have some empathy for this. But if I go to a convenience store and somehow it takes the cashier 10 minutes to checkout 3 people, that empathy becomes hard to find.
At the end of the day, every person getting a paycheck needs to produce more value to the business than they get paid. The only other way is to tax people who DO actually contribute and spread the money around. There are some serious concerns of fairness about that.
Too many people believe in the labor theory of value, meaning one should get paid according to how hard and long one works. This theory is a false god, because employers do not care how long or hard you work, they only care about the value produced.
Being smart means applying your efforts at producing value, and finding ways to produce more value.
Do you believe that most hard workers don't believe they are applying their efforts towards producing value? Do you believe that everyone who receives reward for producing value , did?
It works to what end? For whom? Certainly for some individuals, but does it work for them by the rules of its own narrative? For some concept of "Humanity"? Maybe, but I'm not sure the apparent demographic distributions at play here resemble "Humanity" in any meaningful statistical sense.
But they don't pay for "value produced" either and instead pocket as much of the surplus value as possible. The game is rigged.
2) your points about self identity being intertwined with work is an important one, and something I struggle with quite a bit.
They’re significantly more one dimensional than the wage slave tbh. At least the wage slave has the character of resentment.
I deeply apologize for this possibly snarky, irrelevant comment, maybe it shouldn't be allowed. I just wanted to offer my perspective.
After some time with this, the man grows bored. He complains to the servant, saying heaven is not interesting. The servant replies that he's not in heaven.
It'd be hell.
I suggest you think more about how other people might fundamentally disagree with you.
And who would 1. Pave your roads 2. Keep you safe 3. Care for you when you’re old 4. Keep the electric grid running 5. Etc
Modern society works because there’s a bunch of people who do things they don’t like.
The alternative is that we all go back to being hunter gatherers.
If that were the case Beverley Hills would be a bastion of culture and progress.
Instead what is it? Oh yeah, a hedonistic playpen.
Want to do so much more? Go do it!
This kind of “work” wasn’t done with a primary goal of getting money. Dare I say, it was a “hobby”.
If you hate your job, think about upgrading your job skills to get a job that you would like.
But we also have to acknowledge that simply is not true for a sizeable portion of the population.
The point (for me) is its the moment you make it a job, it becomes drudgery. so the "job" part is what I would need to avoid.
B) My point was that it wasn't really work, hence the quotes. The leisure/aristocracy of the past did need to turn it into work. They simply did it because they liked it.
Of course now that their value has been used up, they have no outlet and just sit around.
Everyone ages differently, and if you're not spry and productive as you age you'll be pushed out regardless of if you can retire.
You know, that’s perhaps because they retired when they simply could not continue working. Perhaps they might have retired before dropping dead if that was an option.
Odd how that magically coincides with turning 65.
Perhaps we can raise people to create their own paths.
False dichotomy. Not working 60 hours a week != leading a life of indolence and sloth.
The hermits going to Alaska with an axe, a saw, and a dream to build a small cabin and live off the land and watch the bears catch salmon, those are certainly ready to make that trade. But your average Western academic talking about work-life-balance? I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility, but it'd be a first.
Yes, the adjunct professor, famous for their work-life-balance.
One solid income used to buy an entire house. Why can't I want to work less and still have a large apartment? And that's without even considering productivity gains.
People can budget for entertainment without long work weeks.
I don't demand much in terms of restaurants and travel and hotels, shrug.
Websites are not expensive to run, and the cost of social media if directly paid for would be single digit dollars a month. Negligible in terms of someone's entire budget.
Just to start, you’re assuming we are using our resources and human labor efficiently.
Which is understandable, and that choice should be theirs to make -- if they accept that it has a direct impact on everything they get, and don't rely on others working more to compensate for them working less.
Surely you have more imagination than that.
I mean - hunter gatherer societies usually had all their food gathering and chores done in just a few hours a day. Spending the rest of their time doing all those things humans like to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco...
We could probably figure out how to remove inefficiencies from the markets and have 20 hour workweeks, if enough of us wanted to.
3) if all billionaires in the US liquidated absolutely all personal wealth and evenly distributed it, what would happen?
720 billionaires * 10B average wealth / 300M US population = 24k USD per person 1 time payment
Covid stimulus was like, 9k ish depending on your bracketing? So just imagine 2 or 3 covid payments. The conclusion should be that it's not going to change the fabric of how life in America functions. It's certainly not gonna grant GP commenter the ability to chill and paint for the rest of their lives.
"It is this way, has been this way, and you will like it or leave." With that said, it should come as no shock when various rejections of this idea take hold. How could one rationalize not attempting to critically re-evaluate the situation? What is all this progress for?
I can't imagine why the birth rate is falling in certain places so precipitously. /s We tell parents they should have expensive kids for the good of society. We tell kids they have to grow up and support themselves over a lifetime because that's the deal.
You can critically re-evaluate until the cows come home. Won't materially change anything.
I miss old school labor, or at least how they're described in the history books. Forcefully changing things for the better. Now we have a bunch of people critically evaluating everything on social media, expecting things to change as if they asked to speak with society's manager, expecting them to fix it.
However, that's a wildly simplistic view of things.
You can't just say this without realizing that there are severe drawbacks to this. We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living, all the benefits of our times, maintain scientific progress, maintain national security and many, many others.
The ultimate goal should maybe be productivity, and if 4h is better than 8h for whatever reason, then let's do that. But it's definitely not so simple.
Do you really think we are using our resources and technology efficiently? Because that’s the implication here. I think that’s frankly absurd.
Maybe the global maxima is not the standard 9-5 work day, that’s almost a given, but to claim that working dramatically less will yield better results is absurd.
> There was not time in which a common person did not have to do drudgery to get on with life.
Is hunting drudgery? Are epic food-gathering missions? Creating new towns and villages?
Sorry but your ancestors were regularly getting eaten alive by wild animals a few generations back (heck it's still an existential threat to some people). People had to resort to canibalism to survive famines. Plague, TB, polio. Just a hundred years ago there was ~1 in 100 chance a woman would die during childbirth. >40% of kids would not live to age of 5 in 1800s
The only reason you were brought into this world is because your ancestors went through shit you can't even imagine, had children, some of which survived to eventually have you.
I've done this thought exercise many times, traveled extensively, and continue trying different types of work. The truth is that most of us (HN users) have pretty comfortable lives and would be making huge quality of life sacrifices to live the dream of the romanticized past.
There is definitely something to sort out around "what does the high paid knowledge worker do when they no longer have hardship defining their life for them" but I don't know if artificially handicapping yourself and LARPing struggle is the answer.
If you do find the answer then please let me know.
If you aren't happy in your current position you have two choices. You either choose to solve the problem and start taking steps, or you choose to be distracted from the problem.
I know the best times of my life is when I got outside of my comfort zone.
Fear is a cage. The only way out, is through.
Can you articulate the attitude you're reacting against? Because you don't appear to be addressing the OP, who never made a claim about their ancestors having a tough go of it.
> I was not brought into this world to work for 60 years in a job [...] It’s a shame so much of us are forced to spend the best parts of our lives chained to a desk.
Our ancestors would kill for the ability to replace their existence by a desk job.
Likely many of them did kill for the ability to make sure their children had a better life than they did.
But also, why would we need to be sensitive of their feelings?
Man of our ancestors didn't survive the winter, or the plague, or slavery...that doesn't mean I want or necessarily need to wear my self out for someone else's portfolio.
I've had years where I was only present the last 5 minutes before passing out each night. the other 23:55 of the day spent in a mad rush, eat/sleep/work/repeat.
That's nothing to be proud of, especially if you don't have to.
I have to admit that's a new one when it comes to defending the status quo of our work culture
Stating that life should be hard now because your ancestors had it worse is completely missing the point. They all strived to make life better for their progeny. We need to be doing the same. That means refusing to accept things being worse than necessary.
I have nothing against wanting to improve your condition or striving for better - but expecting something just because you were born or a human - really needs some reality checking.
Also your notion that human condition constantly improves through history is not a given - things can very much regress and humanity can disappear.
It's very probable that your highest contribution to society is 9-5 and supporting >2 kids - but it's not very popular to say that I guess.
Everyone is entitled to fight for better conditions
>things can very much regress
That was gp's point
Which life is better on the whole? That of an apex predator in its natural environment or that of livestock?
There is a case to be made that modern humans have been progressively turned into domesticated livestock, abstracted from their ancestral, natural habitat since the neolithic revolution.
It is unclear that cell phones and modern medicine increase net happiness when many work soul sucking, unhealthy sedentary jobs and suffer a long gray existence in nursing homes and hospitals.
Justify wasting your life however you want but calling those who don't agree with your cope "delusional" is rich.
However, the basic human "I don't want more then this" was present in all of them.
It is nit like everyone in history was simultaneously subject of famine, tuberculosis and then died in childbirth.
I'm not sure how this counters the idea that we should not dedicate our lives to menial jobs. It seems kind of unrelated.
> That attitude is so delusional it's hilarious.
I wish we turned down the snark a little bit at HN.
The existential angst you feel is the price society pays so a few can reap clear benefits while many keep pace with the hedonic hampster wheel.
I mean clearly it is a price worth paying so we can watch people do silly dances on tiktok or summon an uber at 2 am to take us home from the bar.
We are here because the human race improved itself, its conditions, to lessen and adapt to environmental limitations and even our own political issues. Not because we worked 50 hour weeks in dead end jobs.
The universe doesn't owe you a life of leasure and following your passions and lofty ideals. It doesn't even owe you a life free of starvation and debiliating sickness, yet that is what you and far, far more people today have, compared to pretty much any time in the past.
A 5 day work week of 40 hours desk work is very light compared to what people 100 or 200 years ago had. Labor unions fought very hard for it. There's memes about medieval peasants working only 150 days a year, but those are bullshit (that is the work they had to do for someone else before they could start to make their own food and necessities). Allegedly, hunter-gatherer societies really did a lot less of what could be called work, but often had to compete violently for hunting grounds or face starvation, and didn't have all that much opportunity to test their creative capabilities either.
If you want to show that you're capable of so much more, go ahead and find a way to do it. I can pretty much promise you that it will involve working more, not less.
Or if you want to fix inequality so that everyone has to work less to make a living, fine, very commendable, I totally agree that is a desirable outcome. But I can also guarantee that people will still have work, and not that much less than now.
so please stop whining like a spoiled child.
Btw, that 5 day work week was fought for by people who were ALSO likely called spoiled children at the time.
If you want a better life, find a specific and achievable way in which it can be better, and work towards that. Quite possibly involving a labor union.
But don't moan poetically about how it's such a shame having to work for your living.
A reminder: the people in the past who went through these things and strived for something more (like the above commenter) are a big part of the reason we have it so easy today.
Agreed. Advancements happen because someone somewhere was dissatisfied with the status quo. It's a prerequisite.
Well, because someone was dissatisfied with the status quo and did something about it. Just complaining doesn't count.
No one's forcing you to do anything. Do all that "so much more".
The problem is then you might want food and shelter and goods and medicine - the results of other's labor. To get that you will have to provide them things of value, i.e., the result of your labor in some form.
If you can do "so much more" then do it and trade for the other things you cannot make.
The reality is that to produce things others want so you can trade for things you want takes work, and that work is not simply having all the fun you feel like every moment.
You sure sound like one, by the level of entitlement ;)
So I take it you provide your own food, build your own home, and do your own healthcare; or find volunteers who love their jobs to do them for you? I hear farming wheat, putting up drywall and examining rashes are jobs that people "only tolerate", it's not generally a calling.
> I am a human being and I am capable of so much more than I can even imagine
Do you happen to be capable of anything useful to other people, as defined by other people themselves? If yes, is it as part of a job you only tolerate, or as part of "so much more"?
I didn't even know workaholism was a word. Good on me, I guess. :)
I find this a very strange idea, and I think it's mostly formed by looking at something without understanding it. The people's motivation the author finds is "they've replaced religion with work". Why isn't it more practical: there's a lot of stuff to do and they want it done, so they do it?
Maybe it's just a divide where neither side understands the other, but I've never understood people who see a big task they want done and don't sink their teeth into it and work hard to get it done. I guess on Orwell's Animal Farm, there's Boxer and there's Napoleon, and Napoleon wonders why Boxer works so hard.
Why they do it though? What's this deep longing that causes them to be more productive instead of, you know, enjoying life?
There will always be lots to be done, and the more that is done the more work will be created to be done on top. I do agree with the point that losing some sense of spirituality (not necessarily a religious/supernatural one) has removed at least one facet of facing life as a human.
Doing work for the sake of feeling accomplished by completing a task seems very meaningless when you are aware you only have one life to experience whatever your soul will be able to, digging your teeth into an endless stream of stuff to do don't really aggrandise your soul, it just makes you a more efficient little human machine.
I'm convinced that there are many things that need just raw manpower thrown at them to make society run as well as it does, and if we all did what in Germany is called "Dienst nach Vorschrift" (aka only do the minimum contractually required), we'd quickly end up with things falling apart. To me it roughly boils down to Kant: act in a way that could be made into law. To prioritize ones leisure and comfort over the needs of society doesn't feel like something we could make into law and still keep being a society.
I'm originally from one of these poorer countries. People do work longer because of survival, because if they don't work as long someone else will and given the lack of employment it become a cutthroat environment for survival of the one willing to sacrifice more, the bosses exploit that even further by dangling the guillotine all the time, "work longer or I will find someone that will". This isn't beneficial to a society, at all.
It's a system of oppression.
> I'm convinced that there are many things that need just raw manpower thrown at them to make society run as well as it does
And we are constantly working to automate or create machinery that makes those more efficient, requiring less manpower when labour gets more expensive. The whole goal should be to work less, not more, work smarter and more efficiently so it requires less hours of someone's life to perform a necessary job for society.
Prioritising one's leisure and free time should be the main driver to work smarter, I've seen so many human lives being wasted away in bullshit jobs and inefficient work at my home country that I wouldn't ever propose that work by itself should be prioritised, workers are not the ones gaining the most out of their work and while this system is in place it will be an eternal struggle between being a servant to some capitalist because you depend on that for survival and living your life to the fullest. I prefer to prioritise my life over someone's else bullshit vision for how to accumulate more capital.
If you are going the Kantian way, this could be made into law: benefits and gains of a worker's work should be directed to other workers, to invest in whatever is needed for workers having to work less.
So I'd say I'm much more into Bertrand Russell's philosophy camp on this topic.
That's my point. It's not just because of oppression (but certainly can be), you'll see the same in subsistence farmers. They don't do a 9-5 with a 1 hour lunch break and frequent chats with colleagues, they toil away because they have their work cut out for them and when whoever does the cutting did it, they took them to be much bigger than they are and cut them a large piece.
I agree with you: we should work less and smarter. But society needs to be kept upright, and too many people are deciding not to work (or to work against it), and then it quickly becomes a game of chicken where those who care the most/can stand the situation the least will pick up the slack.
I'm pretty sure that most advances in productivity will be eaten by growing desires. We have plenty enough to get everyone 20sqm/2000kcal but now we want 70sqm and exotic foods during local winter, and we want to travel the world etc etc.
Some people need to be given a purpose because otherwise they don’t have one. There is a lot of middle ground between the two extremes of total work and no work.
Retail Marijuana sales have only just started in NYC around the same time as remote work, plus outdoor smoking was legalized barely a year ago, so that might be a factor to the increased prevalence of of smelling Dank in the City. Beats hotboxing your apartment or car.
Your evidence is ridiculous. I'm frequently out and about in NYC and I can smell pot every once in a while but not "constantly". I would also imagine that the # of folks smoking pot during work hours is minimal and I don't see an issue with it if you aren't on the clock.
I have never seen porn through someones window either lol. Also most people install window coverings.
If one were born into a Star Trek utopia and never had most of their spark of creativity/curiosity extinguished by a school system designed to pump out worker drones and never had the majority of their waking hours sold off just to exist, I believe they’d be a lot less likely to be a couch potato. There’s no reason the go nuts with burning personal time with “junk food” recreation when personal time has never been at a shortage.
I would argue we are currently at the working constantly extreme and hopefully moving toward a better balance. Cooking soul food is still work that needs to get done. It would be nice to have a little more time each day to cook a proper meal and to have time for more purposeful driven work.
Life's too short. I've lost two of 4 parents and working more hours aren't going to bring them back.
The article however is about the upper-middle class men. So, these arguments are really irrelevant to them (except maybe the caring bit, but I doubt career-oriented people are unaware of how little companies care about them - they can, after all switch, companies). In tech, I've met tons of people who work a lot because they like it and people who could have obviously retired (startup exits) but keep working anyway, in not-so-glamorous jobs, some even as ICs with all the attendant BS.
Apparently less people identify with work and want to work, for a reason that Atlantic fails to tease out. Atlantic claims it's better this way but I'm not so sure. Better for whom? I'm not even certain it's better for the upper-middle class men themselves - would they get some better ways to self-actualize instead? Not a given. It's unlikely better for the economy, or for anyone else really.
Everyone has different preferences. Based on those they get different outcomes. I actually have also met, and read on HN tons of people in tech who kinda resent people who work a lot because it makes them look bad. But many cannot admit this to others (or themselves) so they invent all kinds of justifications about how it's bad for people to work hard for an uncaring company not being a founder, or how it's better to have kids or go surfing and be a balanced person, or whatever. And really this outcome of getting more done is bad and maybe even fake and they are not better than me!
It's like the books about athletes, where they always emphasize that people who realize their genetic potential are the ones who love the grind and train a ton in a structured way (practicing serves, reading chess books, doing drills, whatever it is). If you don't like the boring repetitive training, and don't force yourself, you won't get as good. Then you can either say "well, I am not as good at training so I'm not going to get good at this sport, it's my fault only, and that's ok". Or you can come up with some excuses or devalue others' outcomes.
This article is just the latter "oh I was too lazy to practice serves so I never got good at tennis, but all those tennis players kept practicing even after making a bunch of money. Well now they are stopping and it makes me feel better, so I conclude it's better for society"
The reason people resent folk who work crazy hard isn't because it makes them look bad (though it's probably factor to an extent). It's because that that preference has become the default for the whole of society in the West. The article points out that both policy in the US and social norms/values have become highly preferenced towards those who work crazy hard. The point isn't that it's bad for certain individuals to value work over everything else, it's that it's bad for society as a whole.
As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised. And despite the rhetoric here it's perfectly possible to value work and work hard without it being your top priority in life.
Why is it bad specifically?
> As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised
Imagine you want to remodel your bathroom. Or, also, imagine you have a bad water leak in your bathroom - after all, on-call is one of the major things people in tech complain about with regard to work-life balance. You call up two otherwise similar plumbers, and one tells you that he can be there ASAP to fix your leak, and he'll do the plumbing for the remodel in 2 visits next week. The other is a balanced person so he won't fix your leak until Monday, and he doesn't like to work for a long stretch of time, so the remodel's gonna take 4 visits, sometime next month. Cost's the same, so you hire the 1st plumber. How would you feel if the 2nd one calls you back and complains he's unfairly "being penalised for his preferences"?
That's the thing. Everyone (ok, most people) would prefer to hire (or work with) a workaholic, other things being equal. But in abstract, some mysterious "society" should apparently prefer otherwise.