I recommend people watch Japan A story of love and hate (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x56bwzc) which, aside from being a great look at Japan, epitomizes the absurdity of exchanging our time for a salary that increasingly fails to cover the cost to live and leaves us without free time. 30,000 Japanese kill themselves each year due to work related stress.
Great quote from the doc:
Naoki:"You (the West) game me this f*cking Capitalist system 100 years ago..."
Cameramen: "And now you're rich"
Naoki: "Is this rich...is this a good system?"
I hope - and expect - that one day offices are viewed in the same way we view the factories of the early industrial age: prisons of drudgery and misery.
I'm not naive, civilization and its innumerable benefits (like actually being able to live past 65) has a cost. But the notion that sitting in traffic each morning to reach a room where one stares into a screen for 9 hours - every day, for 40 odd years - is desirable is the greatest con capitalism has ever pulled.
I agree with the sentiment, but respectfully propose that the office con is part of a larger and even more brazen : commodifying all of reality. Besides all of the relatively well-known ethical and psychological problems with selling and buying time and land, commodification also greatly diminishes the development of what Marxists like to call "the productive forces" -- if not for this artificial system of value created to mask European conquest, we could easily be in some an unimaginably technologically advanced post-scarcity heterotopia right now.
I don't see how the capitalism was created to mask the European domination. I think it's just the result of going through the path of least resistance as the concepts of trade, money and globalization are all at play, and not of some intentional/evil cooperation. However, I imagine your point might be explained by some actions of East India Company or such, and I'm not well enough versed on that.
Moreover, could you expand a bit on "ethical and psychological problems with selling and buying time and land"? This sounds like a novel idea to me.
> "...the notion that sitting in traffic each morning to reach a room where one stares into a screen for 9 hours - every day, for 40 odd years - is desirable is the greatest con capitalism has ever pulled."
I think you're ignoring the biggest benefit of capitalism. While many people will do something fairly similar to what you're describing, it's not explicitly required or unchangeable. You have the ability, even if extremely challenging, to strive for better. For a person washing toilets, this could be the dream of sitting in front of that screen one day. For the person in front of that screen, it could be starting their own business or taking an early retirement and living the rest of their years off the beach.
Capitalism enables people to move up. The system you described would actually be perfectly reflective of a more social economic system like communism. The government would measure your competency and then offer you a series of jobs. You would take that a job off that list and you would do it til the day you were allowed to stop working. All without any chance for ever achieving something better beyond that list of jobs they decided you were qualified for. And of course you'd receive the same compensation when you're 18 as when you're 50 with decades of experience, because that's fair...
I think it would be phenomenally interesting to live in a pre-industrial time, just to experience it - but I suspect we'd quickly find that the tedium and unfairness of the systems we have to do would seem like utopia compared to the tedium and unfairness of those times. And so too can we expect people a few hundred years from now to live in what we would consider a utopia, yet themselves lack contentment striving for something better which will indeed come about a few centuries beyond. It's the nature of man to always strive for better and, at least to date, achieve it.
>For a person washing toilets, this could be the dream of sitting in front of that screen one day. For the person in front of that screen, it could be starting their own business or taking an early retirement and living the rest of their years off the beach.
And socialism could eliminate entirely the need to have someone washing toilets. I work in an office of about 2,000 people, over 10 floors, each with 2 sets of bathrooms for each gender. Going by 200 people per floor, assuming 50/50 gender split, that's 50 people per bathroom. It takes about half an hour to clean and restock each bathroom each day. Would you be hugely inconvenienced if you had to give up half an hour of your time every 50 days to clean the bathroom you use at work? I definitely wouldn't, and I think a lot of people would probably treat the bathrooms better if they did have to clean them on occasion.
Furthermore, the cleaners we have now aren't brain-dead animals: they have intellect, ideas, and ambitions of their own. I've met plenty of caretakers and other low-skilled workers who had been trained in other fields in the past, lost their jobs for varying reasons, and couldn't retrain due to time or financial constraints and got stuck in menial labour. Much of the time they simply cannot realistically ever move up the ladder. To quote Stephen Jay Gould:
>“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
We have created a lot of menial jobs for the sake of them: and in a lot of cases, they have been created because as this article mentions, a lot of well-educated workers no longer have the time to do non-work related tasks themselves. Would takeaway deliver drivers really be as common as they are now if people were working twenty hours a week, and had time to cook for themselves? What about Starbucks employees? Taxi drivers? There are millions of people who could actually use their full potential if they weren't constrained by wage slavery. Those people would also be much more efficient at what they do if they had the freedom to do what they enjoyed.
>Capitalism enables people to move up. The system you described would actually be perfectly reflective of a more social economic system like communism. The government would measure your competency and then offer you a series of jobs. You would take that a job off that list and you would do it til the day you were allowed to stop working. All without any chance for ever achieving something better beyond that list of jobs they decided you were qualified for. And of course you'd receive the same compensation when you're 18 as when you're 50 with decades of experience, because that's fair...
This is a huge misunderstanding of communism. There are many, many different forms of anti-capitalism, and very few actually believe a centralised government forcing people to work in pre-determined fields is a good idea. I'm not as clued up on communist/socialist theory as I should be, but afaik what you're describing is a form of state socialism, and one which almost all anti-capitalists vehemently disagree with. I've seen many arguments started by people suggesting state ownership of capital: almost everyone agrees that the risk of corruption is far too high with a centralised state.
I highly recommend reading The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin. It paints an excellent picture of a more reasonable anarcho-communist society, without a centralised state, which could realistically exist. Just to make this comment relevant to the original article: he originally suggested, in the late 19th century, that the industrial era had already increased production to the point that nobody should have to work more than four hours a day. Furthermore, that the time people saved could be spent building tools of automation to further reduce people's workload. It is, if anything, far more relevant today than it was when it was written.
You're not going to just decentralize every job. Toilet washing doesn't sound glorious but janitorial and especially plumbing work comes with some significant skills you have to learn. And besides that, if you spent just 30 minutes for each 'side' job, you'd find everybody in that building working about 20 hours a day and not getting a lick of programming done. There's an enormous amount of work to maintain a 10 story facility, and the vast majority of it is like most work - not exactly pleasant.
Beyond this your argument that janitors have ideas/ambitions/etc again supports a capitalist system. There is nothing overtly stopping these people from trying to take their shot, difficult though it may be. Jack Ma is a good example there. He came from extremely humble beginnings and couldn't get a job even at KFC. He didn't ended up manually biking 'rich' tourists around to get by. In the process he ended up learning English and got exposed to some ideas and concepts that weren't so well known in China. A bit of luck, a lot of ambition, and some great ideas - and he's now one of the richest people in the world. He started his first business when he was already in his 30s, got his first computer when he was 33.
Really I think people are unrealistically critical. Today every child in developed nations has the internet and guaranteed access to basic education and effectively guaranteed access to advanced education. Einstein, for instance, was teaching himself calculus at age 12. That sort of extreme outlier in ability, and maybe even more importantly - ambition and motivation, is not something or somebody that's going to end up end up toiling fields in modern society. And the privileges we all have today are largely a product of the extremes of wealth that allow people to be educated for decades before having to return a single cent back to society.
Specialisation improves efficiency. Sure, you could eliminate that full-time cleaner's job (probably leaving them unemployed) and replace their labour with that of a rotation of high-paid software engineers. Now your company is paying $100k+ a year to keep their toilets clean.
> I encourage everyone to find one thing they love and find a way to do it everyday for the rest of your life.
...is translated to entrepreneurship, when that doesn't have to be a given. I'm still struggling with the alternative possibilities, but I just wanted to point that out.
That said I do agree with your conclusion. It's the path to get there that can keep me up at night, and perhaps not framing it purely in terms of being employed or self-employed might help (not saying that that's what you were saying, btw).
A. You'll mess up that screen you're paid to stare into ;)
B. More seriously, if you ain't being facetious, switch jobs.
But to your point: work is a drag. I don't care how free the food is or how comfortable your ergonomic keyboard feels. Deep down there's something dissatisfying about most corporate life. But at the same time it's never been easier to (try!) start your own thing, as you suggest.
To anybody reading this, go for it. Before responsibility limits your risk-taking. And give it absolutely everything.
I tend to see perks like "free food" as a red flag when I'm job hunting. In my experience, employers that go way above and beyond to make an office comfortable are doing it because they expect you to spend virtually all of your time there. Any office that has a game room or a cafeteria is extremely suspect.
All I need is relative quiet, a reasonable meeting schedule, and decent equipment. I'll buy my own lunch and leave at 5, thanks.
Exactly. I once had a manager who tried to incentivize my team to work overtime for two months to hit an unrealistic deadline set by the sales department. The incentive was that we would have a pizza party IF we hit the deadline. Monetary compensation was never even discussed.
> The incentive was that we would have a pizza party IF we hit the deadline.
This same thing happened to me when I was a wee lad. I then personally ordered and paid for a few pizzas, breadsticks, root beer, a greek salad, about $50 all together, and hosted a pizza party myself at work late at night. To get your slice I just had you sign a petition against unpaid overtime and interest in joining the Teamsters Union. A couple guys didn't want to sign, the others did. A few weeks later I was fired with cause, had a better paying job by the end of the week. Company folded around a year later. And good.
Funny thing, the dude I had in mind was not criticizing the practice. He was giving advice to other employers on how to save money and motivate people.
I always wondered what his employees thought when they read that article and whether the perks worked as nicely after he explained his thinking in public.
>I encourage everyone to find one thing they love and find a way to do it everyday for the rest of your life.
If everyone followed your advice, we would probably have garbage piling up in the streets, because I doubt there are enough people who love collecting it or working in landfills to handle even a fraction of the garbage we generate.
Your reasoning assumes, there can be no one interested in developing automated way to collect garbage or that there could be garbage which is auto collected. My point being, there are endless possibilities if you do not restrict yourself.
>Your reasoning assumes, there can be no one interested in developing automated way to collect garbage
That's ridiculous, my reasoning assumes no such thing. I'm well aware that there are, and for at least decades have been, many people engaged in that exact activity. (Whether they "love" it or not.) And yet, we still need many many people who are willing to undergo the drudgery of manually collecting garbage. My reasoning does assume that we will continue to need those people, albeit in decreasing numbers, for decades to come.
I’ve been there. What you’re contemplating is a permanent solution to a temporary and fixable problem. Change jobs. Optimize for having a life rather than making the most money. Cultivate personal relationships with people you like. Make an effort to live a fuller life.
Capitalism is hardly a “Western” concept. Japan, like many Asian countries, were within China’s sphere of influence long before there was any contact with Westerners.
>It is, based on all conventional historical sources, originating around the 15th century or so with the city states of Italy.<
The parent comment was speaking of “capitalism” as an euphemism for “wage slavery”, not in the classical sense of capitalism as defined by economics i.e. private ownership of the means of production. In that comment, payment for services i.e. wages is hardly “Western”, nor invented in the 15th century CE.
>Which is irrelevant.<
It is relevant because Japan imported many things from China, including the Kanji writing system, culture, mercantilism, systems of government etc.
>The parent comment was speaking of “capitalism” as an euphemism for “wage slavery”
Well, the TFA speaks specifically about the "modern" form of "wage slavery" in Japan -- as tied to big corporations, office and factory jobs, consumer culture, etc, not generally about working to make a living by being paid a wage.
Which is tied to capitalism. People didn't work like that before their contact with capitalism and when "free trade" was imposed on them by force.
Japanese feudalism traditionally left very little freedom to citizens. Your occupation depended on cast you was born in. Samurai could not just take some other job and leave. Neither could peasant. The expectations on your loyalty and obeisance were super high. I am not sure they lost all that much with capitalism, maybe even gained.
Sounds like your life has been gracious to give you many different experiences. I think the distaste is mostly from people who've worked their lives in an office job. Yeah it's cake, but are you gonna do it for 40 years and die happy?
My take is that organisations after some time begin to mimic animal farm or emperor's clothes type behavior. CEO genuinely believes their contribution to a company they ran for five years yet has been around 50 years is worth hundreds of millions. I have no issues with founders taking that amount of money. Director of marketing doesn't want to be outdone, vice president ...
This is why we are so busy and why companies are chasing growth at all costs.
Most boards would likely block any kind of cash compensation approaching eight or nine figures, and will strongly insist on stock options.
The headlines you see about 9-figure CEO compensation are mainly related to companies whose stock has outperformed. CEOs whose stock languished and didn’t amount to much compensation rarely make magazine covers.
I'm of the opinion that the root of the problem is inflation (but I'm open to correction).
My thinking is that we're constantly being pushed to work harder because no business today can reach a successful steady-state -- it must keep growing. The reason businesses must keep growing is that investors demand it. Investors demand it because they believe that wealth sitting around not making more wealth is a waste. Inflation, I believe, is a big component of this view. What would happen if we keep inflation near-zero? Is slow growth really a bad thing?
I agree that there are likely negative social consequences from inflation, but the idea that inflation is the reason a business can't reach a steady-state because of inflation seems to ignore Red Queen[1] like affects.
Something I've noticed a lot in tech is that companies will spend a huge amount of money to push new features that aren't core to the business and to launch new products that frequently fail. I've always viewed these as attempting to prevent competition from emerging rather than trying to compensate for inflation.
No idea why you are being downvoted. A Red Queen's Race is exactly what's going on. Even without much currency inflation there is constant pressure for businesses to outgrow each other because... well... everyone else is doing it! It's exactly like the constant arms race that occurs between nations and forces them to constantly spend trillions of dollars on weapons that will mostly never be used.
Frankly i see the pressure coming from the financial world.
There is a massive, blinding, focus on quarterly profits and dividends.
This leads to all kinds of hype cycles and cargo cults to try to goose the stock price, no matter how hail mary or unhealthy it is for the corporation in the long term.
There's a [1] hypothesis that economic growth is mostly the result of 1) population growth, 2) energy consumption, and 3) interest rates.
Current projections estimate that population will peak at 8.7 billion in 2055. Nearly all of that growth will occur in "developing" countries. Yuval Harari makes the case in Homo Deus that the world is quickly reaching a point where the less developed areas of the world will be mostly ignored and left behind in the coming years, as the developed world has reached a sort of critical mass that it makes more sense -- economically -- to keep investing there.
As technology continues to get more and more efficient, it is quite possible we are near peak energy consumption.
Interest rates have been around 0% for quite some time.
To me, it's interesting to wonder if we live in a world that might "objectively" be getting better, but we don't see the verification with the same type of economic growth that's occurred in the past.
Labor, technology, and capital (not sure I completely agree with #3). But these are the ways you grow economies in real terms (based on my econ studies).
If we kept inflation close to zero (or negative) wealth would tend to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, and the bias would be toward idle rentiers. People like property landlords would get unbelievably rich by collecting mandatory continuous rent payments. Since deflating currency holds or increases in value they'd have zero incentive to do anything with it other than hoard it. Eventually you end up with a landed nobility.
Add to this the fact that deflating currency makes loans hard to service and biases the lending market toward default. This further decreases the incentive for those with a lot of currency to lend it since the probability of losing it to default becomes higher.
The ideal is probably a little bit of inflation. I think it's possible that we have too much, and that we are misinformed about that because we are measuring the wrong things. I'm not positive but I seem to remember that the CPI does not include things like rent and college tuition, which if true is utterly insane and makes it a bogus statistic.
"Hedonic adjustments" sounds like a term for "the number is whatever we want it to be but we want it to sound official so people don't question it."
If you mix "hedonic adjustments" into every number then there is zero value in the numbers. There is no meaningful way to quantify a "hedonic adjustment". Is a smartphone a positive or negative "hedonic adjustment" relative to a landline? Lots of people would say it's positive. Lots would say it's negative. Nobody knows the actual answer because smartphones have only existed for a few years.
> it must keep growing. The reason businesses must keep growing is that investors demand it.
That's true of growth investors, but rarely represents the entire investment community.
Bond investors (whose market is an order of magnitude larger than stocks) want fixed yield - they could care less if the business grows or languishes during that time, as long as the coupon checks keep coming. Real estate investors (whose playing field is also orders of magnitudes larger than public equities market) also usually sign up for a preferred fixed yield, growth being secondary.
Even within the equities markets not everybody is a growth investor, with a lot of people buying for value or dividend yield.
The overwhelming majority of businesses don't have investors to care about. Ignoring that, investors demand growth because that's basically the definition of investing. If businesses don't want to be pressured to grow then they don't have to take money from people who want growth.
Removing inflation wouldn't stop people from chasing growth. People want to make more money. 2% annual inflation changes the calculations a bit (towards more proactive investing), but in a world of 0% inflation people would still want to make money. They would just be a bit more conservative since there's no penalty for holding.
And yes, slow growth is a bad thing. Our population is growing. The pie has to be grown if we don't want living standards to nosedive.
What if it is actually people just not realizing what stability is because they've never experienced it? If you're further away from understanding stability from experience - say for example emotionally, or life-style, or health-wise - then how could you know it when you see it manifesting in a company?
The root cause is more fundamental than just inflation. In order to form a new business or expand an existing business, entrepreneurs need capital. Rational investors will only give out that capital if they expect a good rate of return (enough to compensate for the risk of losing the investment and not having that money available for other uses). Thus businesses most grow in order to pay back investors. Otherwise potential investors would just hoard their capital and the economy would never advance.
Growth and inflation are separate concepts. Inflation measures how nominal prices change year to year (price of a pint of milk) while growth measures the increase in aggregate output (total volume of milk produced.)
Our econonomic system is predicated on continual growth but inflation has been incredibly low since the late 1990s in most western economies, 0-2% compared to 10% or more in the 1970s and 80s.
When people talk about business growth they are typically looking for a return above and beyond inflation.
I'd also say there really isn't any such thing as a steady state for businesses not because of inflation but due to the need to keep pace with general human progress and invention in order to stay competitive in the market place.
What force do investors use to demand it? How do they force a non-compliant company to grow? Esp for companies that are already profitable and don't need investment money.
That depends on the specific details. In publicly trades companies they sell their shares, causing the shares price to drop and the company valuation to drop. This will make it harder for the company to get credit and will lower the value of the owners shares.
Bigger investors can have more direct force, either in voting power or in assigning their own director to the board.
As long as there are marginal gains to be made from working an extra hour I don't see this changing. Imagine if one country decided to change from a 40 hour work week to a 20 hour work week. If this decreases their GDP from producing less output, then they become economically weaker, their standard of living in terms of purchasing power is diminished, and the tax base is decreased. I think the biggest reason we don't see more leisure time is the same reason wild animals don't see much leisure time: competition. At the international level, countries which produce more are more powerful, and at the domestic level other things being equal an individual who produces more will command a higher income, which translates to gaining a bigger slice of the economic pie and the additional power that confers. I suspect many of the people on hacker news could easily live on half the income they make, but we choose not to, because we prefer the extra affordances of working full time or more.
It's just people being wired to compare their lives with other's. Humans evolved in small groups with hierarchies where your "rank" compared to others could mean the difference between life and death. Not so much these days, but the habit is still there.
Luckily, we also evolved big brains that let us override almost any instinct and with a bit of effort we can be perfectly happy with any slice of the pie.
P.S. I'm somebody that gave up a large fraction of my salary to be able to work part time and travel the country. It's been worth it so far.
This is fairly inconsistent with countries with riding inequality, such as the US. If anything, rising inequality shows that rather than there being a gradual curve of salary proportional to hours worked, there are tiers of salary and not much in the middle.
My last job, I had so much more free time. I finished at 4 each day and sometimes took 3 hour lunches. Someone would text me in another city and ask if I could come through and meet them. I would often just walk out of work (it wasn't a problem) and go meet them. If it meant that I didn't get back to the office that day, so be it.
There was lots of time spent with friends and family, it was great.
My current job, I eat lunch at my desk and spend so much less time with friends and family. A couple of months ago I was working from 8AM to 3:30AM, then was back to the office for 8AM the following day.
I make more money now, but I was so much happier before.
I often think about just quitting work and taking a year or two off, just do me things and figure stuff out. What I want from life, what my prioritie are etc.
But then I worry if you take that long off, how hard would it be to get back to work afterwards? Are employers even going to entertain my CV
FWIW a friend of mine took 9 years off work. When he decided that he wanted to work again as a programmer it took him about a month to find employment. He's a smart guy though.
The college-educated are hardly ever long-term unemployed. There will be costs (for one, I felt so insecure that I might not find a job that I'm still anxious). But the main mechanism of "unemployed once, never work again" is unskilled workers who get depressed and so fat they can't even fit into a forklift. Not skilled people finding the labor market somehow unwilling to clear.
No. Unfortunately, they closed our office and moved a lot of the work offshore. As an aside, I did have a little laugh a year after they let us all go, it came out in the news that they missed a LOT of SLAs that next year and it potentially cost them millions.
I know of one company that keeps track of layoffs at a single multinational, and hires all of the engineers who get laid off. Inevitably, the company seeks out the laid-off engineers to hire them back and has to hire them as consultants. This only works off of companies with this style of management.
Possible plot twist: One of the C-levels or their friend owns the company that rents the engineers back. In other words it's not a dumb business decision, but a way to line someones pockets at the expense of a public company.
This is just my creative imagination, I'm not jaded.
Been there, done that. I'm currently starting to work again.
Honestly, the time off has been amazing (more than I expected), but it's hard to overstate how hard it is to readjust now. Employers haven't been a problem, it's about myself: I'm experiencing anxiety attacks for the first time in my life and I'm worried I'm going to slip into depression - something I've never gone through before.
If you want my advice: If you've got some savings you can afford to spend, try to actively search for a job that is more bearable, and yet sustainable long term.
It shouldn't require you leaving your current job until you find a new one, but rather you want your money to act as a mattress to fall back on if things go south so you can try new things. NEVER let your savings drop below a certain threshold, because going to work is way more manageable if you can tell yourself that you can walk away if you really need it. Once that possibility is gone you feel like a slave.
There is a lot more bureaucracy built into the systems we have to deal with these days as well (David Gaerber's "Utopia of Rules" is a good read on this).
I have a lot of stuff to do, and was kind of getting on top of it recently. I needed to renew my driving license here in Spain. I needed two appointments (trying to fit them around work). I have been given a temporary license for the time being and am waiting on the new one to be posted. I noticed that the temporary paper has my name spelled wrong, so there is a good chance I will need at least one more appointment just to get that typo fixed when the plastic version comes through.
I guess another factor is the changing nature of jobs. Certainly in IT you need to devote at least some time to keeping up with new tech or you will become obsolete. I find this especially frustrating when a lot of the "new" is just a rehash of stuff from 30 years ago. Its also why I hate fronted work, as the ecosystem is a constantly changing mess.
I found this article really interesting and extremely well written. The excerpt below is a literary masterpiece.(other comments complain about paywall but on mobile I got "3 articles free" message. Not sure if they're A/B testing or if they're giving me free stuff because I'm in South Africa and they assume that online payments are hard here)
"Leisure time is now the stuff of myth. Some are cursed with too much. Others find it too costly to enjoy. Many spend their spare moments staring at a screen of some kind, even though doing other things (visiting friends, volunteering at a church) tends to make people happier. Not a few presume they will cash in on all their stored leisure time when they finally retire, whenever that may be. In the meantime, being busy has its rewards. Otherwise why would people go to such trouble?
Alas time, ultimately, is a strange and slippery resource, easily traded, visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too much of it. Instead, most people worry over how it flies, and wonder where it goes. Cruelly, it runs away faster as people get older, as each accumulating year grows less significant, proportionally, but also less vivid. Experiences become less novel and more habitual. The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past, with the most vibrant memories tucked somewhere near the beginning. And of course the more one tries to hold on to something, the swifter it seems to go"
This is good indeed, and reminded me in a way of a couple of musings on time that I found somehow enlightening at a particular turning point in my own life:
It was Grandfather’s watch and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s.
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
[...]
I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.
[...]
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
Novel experiences slow down time while habitual behaviors speed it up. However, we are almost by definition creatures of habit. They're necessary in order to function efficiently. So you could argue there's a tension between living efficiently and living well.
But most people never get far enough to worry about. Our world has been designed to lure people into poor behavioral loops like watching TV, browsing social media, and otherwise consuming aimlessly and mindlessly. Sadly, there appears to be a strong incentive to induce that kind of adverse behavior in users/customers.
Well said. Reminds me of something I read, about memory tends to remember novel and interesting things. It went on to mention how seniors like to point out how quickly life goes by, but that that's just because they (generally) live such regimented and static lives, that there's nothing particular to remember or take note of, so the time just passes by them.
This is true, as Einstein’s quote describes in the article:
“An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
What a great goal. Structuring life as a series of awe inspiring experiences.
I’m not convinced it’s novelty that drives it as opposed to how much awe is inspired. For instance, sitting on the park bench with your gorgeous wife could be as mesmerizing the 100th time as it was the first time.
Edit: A more nuanced interpretation could be that if you’re fully in the moment, that 100th time is purely novel.
I wonder if this author has children. I couldn’t read because of paywall. My life came to a slow and boredom was setting in slowly until I had a child. Living through his life makes me feel excited again, not for myself but knowing everything he’ll go experience. If anyone reading this has a choice in having kids but hadn’t yet, I’d highly recommend it. Yes it’s hard and strange at first but worth every moment. Just now I smiled at my 6 Mo old kiddo and he laughed at me. It's moment like this that make me realize what's important in life and one of the reasons I enjoy working for myself from home - even at the cost of much less pay.
Alternatively, if you can’t or don’t want children of your own. You can leverage the power of other people’s children. Sounds creepy but hear me out: it’s either your niece or nephew or a family friends’ kids. I am good friends with an older couple and I go to the daughter’s softball games once in a while. I’m a guy so it doesn’t look right so I try not to overdo it, but when she does well I feel like a proud parent and when she does poorly I feel bad. Not as intense as what her parents must feel but I prefer less intensity in my emotions. Which is why I had a vasectomy at age 29 but I digress.
I feel like the idea of “living through” one’s kids has a lot of negative connotations——pushing them to spend hours a day on something they hate, etc. But there is absolutely something to be said for being able to see the world through your kid’s eyes. They get so excited about things that are totally mundane to adults. (My one year old yesterday had to stop and examine each little hole in the sidewalk as we walked.) That wonder at the world is certainly infectious.
There’s beauty in seeing the world through a child’s eyes, even as an adult. Where life is wonder. Nature is really great at infecting one with wonder as well.
This one is strange to me, as I can't help but see it as an offset of sorts. The problem unresolved, has been pushed onto the next generation. That generation, having encountered the same problem, will then, too, push it to the next generation.
> "what's important in life"
Very common epithet. The important thing in your life is the next person? And then the important thing in the life of that person is their next person? Wait, what?
> Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest.
Living fully in this moment now feels way underrated.
I'm not sure their psychological/cultural reasons translate very well to continental europe. The people that surround me in Germany have all the time they want.
Besides that:
> No one has ever complained of having too much of it.
Isn't that just being bored? I'm sure I've heard people complaining about that.
I think people who complain about being bored are simply scared of being alone with their thoughts. I don't mind doing "nothing" on a train or bus ride, it gives me time to slow down a little and just think to myself.
I think this "gotta be busybusybusy" thing originated in the US, but it is definitely spreading.
I see way too many people who are way too wrapped up in their careers or are constantly stressing about all the things they "have to do", and they forget to actually enjoy anything, because they're already mentally at the next thing.
I love lazy Saturdays on the couch, and I wouldn't trade them for anything.
Honestly it's about ownership of homes and debt levels. If you aren't in massive debt and you own your home, small efforts can easily pay off other costs and you can live a comfortable life. If you lose your job but you own your house and have a small amount of savings (most don't), at least you won't get evicted...
And because wages are so artificially depressed by the suprarich, it takes two jobs to support a life far too often. Noam Chomsky talks about how at the beginning of the industrial revolution the people were skeptical of the 6-9 job that payed a pittance as essentially not much better than chattel slavery, the only difference being you got to go home at night.
This is about class warfare, this is about the oligarchs fucking us all constantly and consistently while we do nothing because the people we expect to do something (the government) are corrupted, blackmailed, coerced, and lobbied into the ground until they break to the oligarchs will (which is why there is truly only one party at the moment, the oligarchs party).
Add on top of that the unconstitutional private banking conglomerate known as the fed and the 16th amendment, and you have a recipe for runaway inflation, devaluation of purchasing power, and increases in poverty, homelessness, and work hours needed to support the cost of living per area.
Jackson was a piece of shit when it came to the natives, but that far too often overshadows the importance of his effort to fight the banks. (Also, him beating the brits with marines, sailors, militiamen and pirates is a movie I want to make someday.)
Shades of Smedley Butler if you ask me. Anyone remember that? Oh yeah, they don't teach you in public school that a bunch of facist corporate oligarch banker types tried to attempt a coup on the American government via a Marine Corps general who double-crossed them and reported it all to congress all in ~1933? Oh yeah, they blacked out the names until John Spivak published them.
Everywhere Americans look they're pressured to consume more, achieve more, live beyond their means, go into debt (student loans, car loans, home mortgages), and have a family on top of it all while saving for some fabled retirement and college tuition for the kids.
If you unplug and simplify your life, don't bother with pursuing a family, you'll see how disincentivized to be busy you are and how absurdly everyone else appears to be living. But if you pursue all the things your competitors are pursuing, you'll find yourself having to acquire similar levels of resources. There's not enough to go around for _everyone_ to have that amount of excess, hence it must be fought over.
Basically what you have is a non-violent (most of the time) resource competition determining who gets how much of what in what order, where the participants aren't even pursuing a specific quantity - they're just after as much as possible while they're still able, MORE.
edit:
After writing the above, I remembered this short video from the 90s, semi-related. [1]
Societies compete with each other like organisms. Successful societies propagate. Primary dimensions of competition are demographics, economics, and military. Thus the history of social organization is necessarily a history of extracting ever-more value from the labor of society's members.
Keynes and others seem to have labored under the delusion that the history of social organization is a history of ever-increasing happiness for society's members.
My current guess is that a large part of this is the increase in various amounts of "chores" to manage, and this potentially increases with more wealth. Bills to pay, insurances to get, appointments to make, this or that government obligation to fulfill, monitoring credit report and data breaches, investing money here or there, getting real estate...
+ other things, like continuous learning, information collection, designing exercise schedules, designing diet systems...
With the persistent threat that if you mess these up there will be trouble.
Related to this, I wonder if the proliferation of these things is why conscientiousness is currently strongly associated with success. I've seen highly intelligent people have significant failures in their lives because they simply couldn't efficiently manage the bureaucracy that it seems it is assumed you can just manage automatically, which very much does not seem to be the case.
In reality, I think the current small (and large) task management load is simply too large for most people to properly handle, and wealth doesn't particularly help with all this because it doesn't directly increase the mental load surface... unless you outsource the work somewhere else...
If 'busy' means that your time is filled with things to do, that -can- be a good thing. My impression is that before technology, media, communications, health, and rising standards of living life was -a lot- more boring.
Every day on the 'net I see that hundreds of people who've not only found specialized, fascinating topics, but finally have someone to talk to about them. Sure beats taking anti-depressants.
To the extent that busy means 'paying for all this stuff I have to have': how much of it do I really need? Are we victims of 'have to have' obesity? I'll just gently suggest that, for many in the West, the answer is yes.
This "must be busy" mindset and 50+ hour work weeks is so utterly alien and wrong to me, and I'm glad I feel this way.
I would never let a job get in the way of family and social experiences, in the way of my life. Relaxation and leisure time is absolutely non-negotiable for me, I would never give up on a concert or culinary experience or anything else for something as mundane as work.
I think this mindset has also gifted me with more patience and more ability to not be bored, compared to most of my peers. Luckily, all of my friends share my mindset, anyone too work-obsessed simply doesn't fit in for long.
My office recently moved across town so I started going in early to beat traffic. I also started leaving early. Leaving early felt strange until I made a conscious decision to embrace it as a sort of healthy difference between me and the others that stay until 5 or 6. Recently I've been slipping and staying longer for "work reasons". The negative impact on my drive and home life is obvious enough to get me back on track and out the door by 3 or 3:30.
I am the same as you, alas I cannot afford not to work the hours I do (for which I have copped quite a bit of flack on HN about).
I do wonder why people who can afford to spend time with their family and not work 60-70 hours per week, actually do.
I can only imagine it would be that they really enjoy their work that much, or their in a culture such as here in Japan where you stay until the boss leaves - or else. (Not my situation, I'm a chef, stupid hours in my industry).
>> I do wonder why people who can afford to spend time with their family and not work 60-70 hours per week, actually do.
I've found that being unhappy at home can lead to working late (even subconsciously). The thing is, these things are often related in subtle ways. If I were to over-generalize I might say that having poor boundaries is part of why they stay late, and a part of the problems they are avoiding at home.
I won't say I /work/ 60 hours a week, but there's times I spend 60 hours a week at work because it's simply more pleasant than anything else I have.
And that's not subconscious, it's a very present tension between "ugh I shouldn't be here so much (but it's easy)" and "ugh I don't want to go home and face the reality I'm avoiding".
I suspect a lot of the long hours is actually a sort of productivity blindness. I've seen some research that suggests the people who most believe they're being effective working >40hrs/wk for more than 6 week stretches are the least likely to have positive net value after 40hrs. Worse is this compounds, such that working less hours in the short term do tend to result in less productivity, until one can recover from overwork.
Sadly, I'm not sure it translates well to industries like yours, where there is just a lot of physical labor involved, and long door hours. My understanding, is that one of the problems is simply the hours in the restaurant business require chef's attention for long hours each day, coupled with the vital need that the kitchen's output is consistent.
Hopefully you're thinking of ways to not have to be present, or ways to spend money instead of time, or just simplifying the menu to be less labor intensive. My heart goes out to you though, I know some chefs, and they are a special breed.
I'm terrified of letting people into my life, and the biggest reason is I'm afraid they'll cut into my work time. Now, sure, there's probably a bunch of Freudian damage that's gone into this. But however I got this way, I am this way, and I don't mind.
I mostly work alone, as of the past few years. Occasionally take consulting work or contracts. When I do have coworkers, my relationship with them is typically good to very good.
After you spent some time working that much, you forget what to do when you are not working. You will forget how to socialize out of work, you will not know activities you might like, you will loose friends and family will be alienated and used to live without you (you being suddenly at home will be distracting to them).
You come home and it is empty and lonely - you can watch tv or play game, but it likely feels pointless. Staying long in work allows you to drown the pointless feeling, at least you can feel good about yourself.
> I would never let a job get in the way of family and social experiences, in the way of my life.
For some people there is little choice. I have a limited mental budget for social experiences. Spending 40hr/week at the office already over-extends this budget, resulting in no social life whatsoever.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread part of it is economic but part of it is also a macho business culture that views overwork as a status symbol. It's really bad in some professions. If we think engineers and tech businesspeople have it bad talk to an architect.
Exactly, I think it's some sort of twisted pride — "I work more than you, so I'm superior to you" — and a remnant of Protestant work ethic. Work hard in this life, to be rewarded in the eternal afterlife. It has lost its religious connection, but the attitude remains.
I'll stay half an hour or an hour beyond by nominal working hours, if I have a time critical task that depends on me, but I'll compensate for it the next day. And I won't do it if it conflicts with my life outside of work. Then the work will simply have to be delayed a bit.
Luckily, I have only ever had colleagues and managers who understand this 100%. I've even had a few tell me directly that they wish they could have the same attitude and take better care of themselves.
I guess people work long hours out of necessity. Where I work, there are people who regularly put in 12 hour days, and even work at the weekend. This puts pressure on other people and makes the overall culture bad.
At least in software dev, we have some choices. There aren't that many choices for people in other professions. It is put up or leave situation, and people end up with long hours.
I like to say I'm discovery-oriented rather than goal-oriented. Being so means I also seek to avoid being overworked because I don't know how to not prioritize discovery. I've tried joining work with pleasure but I find it doesn't lead to good things.
Personal attacks aren't ok here. Whatever substantive point you want to make, I'm sure you can make it thoughtfully and without stooping to this if you want to.
Humans, like every other organism on this Earth, have been shaped by evolution, which has instilled a set of adaptations into them.
Like most other species, there is a competition for mates, reproduction opportunities and resources within the sexes. So, along the ages, humans have acquired a set of adaptations that "maximize" wealth, status, (whether they still work in the current environment as opposed to the ones in which these adaptations evolved is another question). So, in essence, humans who tended to work more, tended to obtain more resources/wealth thereby becoming more attractive reproductive prospects. You also get more opportunities to help fellow tribe members, improving your status within your community etc. In other words, a highly competitive arms race has emerged.
However, only in recent times, intellectual work has become more common, where the size of the input is not proportional to the quality of the output.
There is another dimension to this. Many humans today work in corporate environments where there is an intense competition for advancing in a rigid hierarchical structure. These advances are strongly correlated with income growth, and power and control over many work-related issues, which is strongly related to status. In these environments, it is often difficult to actually measure the output quality and quantity of each human, partly because there is little incentive to do that, partly because people doing the measurement are not the most technically knowledgeable in the field, but mostly because they are humans themselves and thus have their own interests (namely improving their reproductive prospects themselves, so they need to forge allegiances that stabilize their positions etc). Promoting the most capable worker is sometimes outside their interests. So in this environment, many other cues are used to evaluate the worth of employees, many completely unrelated to their capabilities and work. So, marketing oneself becomes an important aspect in this economy.
One clear way to signal to others that you are very dedicated to the company and an important employee is to spend more time at the office than the others. Busyness is a signal of importance/status and value to the company. Of course, people actually interested in performing high quality intellectual work will know that time spent on a task is only one (minor) factor ...
I'm always amazed how I end up seeing long threads from HN users who read an article, but when I click on it, there is a pay wall. Are all those readers subscribers to these news sites?
On Firefox with uBlock Origin and I could read the whole article without any extra steps. And also yes, I agree, this post only has a few comments but others that have more and require a form of subscription to continue reading make me feel the same way.
Great quote from the doc:
Naoki:"You (the West) game me this f*cking Capitalist system 100 years ago..."
Cameramen: "And now you're rich"
Naoki: "Is this rich...is this a good system?"
I hope - and expect - that one day offices are viewed in the same way we view the factories of the early industrial age: prisons of drudgery and misery.
I'm not naive, civilization and its innumerable benefits (like actually being able to live past 65) has a cost. But the notion that sitting in traffic each morning to reach a room where one stares into a screen for 9 hours - every day, for 40 odd years - is desirable is the greatest con capitalism has ever pulled.