Can somebody reconcile this with statistics about TV watching, which suggest that people watch about 3-5 hours of TV/Netflix per day [1]?
A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.
Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something?
I think TV, YouTube, or even Podcasts can trigger a similar mechanism to socialization, but without any of the risk that comes from interacting with real people.
Speculating I'd guess that the low lift and reduced anxiety means more people get stuck in it as a local maximum even if they'd be happier otherwise.
Speaking from anecdotal experience with online communities, when idling or toying at home during their free time, people actually engage socially with friends through chats, networks, games — pick your entertainment drug. They're everything but alone, and it's genuinely real if limited cognitively compared to a real physical interaction.
If you add voice chat to that, at the end of the day you really feel like you spent X hours with friend(s), there's just no other way to put it except for the physical location.
It's almost a given to me that with appropriate videoconf wall-sized (real-world size) screens in all living rooms, we'd just "invite" friends this way most of the time unless the physical interaction was necessary. Less maintenance, less friction to just spend a cool quality hour.
The 'effort' required to move out of your house is getting increasingly higher, your 'local maximum' would essentially converge to an actual maximum in a perfect virtual reality (of which the "80%" / good enough might be just around the next decade).
Chatting through text is nice but no substitute for face-to-face interaction which is getting rather sparse. We can't, at once, claim to be both lonely and socially satiated by tech, and it seems quite a few are lonely.
I don't know if it's even about the risk of interaction. I think there's just some mental equivalent of junk food going on. Junk food works by abusing our sensitivity to sweet, salty, and fatty, turning normal hunger into gluttony.
This is why you see people holding conversations in real life while still sneaking looks (or not sneaking) at their phones. They're junkies.
> But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.
One of the main points of the article is that many people don't know their schedules in advance. So even if schedules do line up, they may not know in enough time to schedule something. TV watching is also a done-in-the-margins activity. The tv exists in the same place they sleep and eat. I don't see anything to reconcile.
Lots of people have something on the TV just about all day long (or at least the whole time they're home—for retired folks this can actually be the entire day) and skew the numbers higher, I think. My parents do it, just leave the TV on even if they're not paying attention to it. I bet it's on 12+ hours a day at their house, on average. I have some friends whose home life was similar growing up—if someone's home, the living room TV's on, even if no-one's actually watching it.
Yes there is overlap, but it's not a predictable overlap and there's no easy way to find out if your time off overlaps with someone else without first reaching out to them (which is a whole other barrier). It's so much easier to turn on netflix or whatever. If it wasn't so easy to do that then maybe people would go through the other hurdle to test if someone they know is available.
I'm not sure what all is wrapped into "TV" in today's numbers, but average household watching as been, to my way of thinking, astoundingly high forever. It was 7 or 8 hours a day going back to the 70s and 80s.
Is this statistic for the total hours watched each person or the whole family, meaning 4 people watching 1 hour of TV is 4 hours of viewing? Because I don’t see how anyone, even people who don’t sleep much, could have 8 hours a day for television.
That would require a person to get home from work at 5pm and watch until midnight or 1am continuously.
Those are household numbers. I assume that they are/were partially driven by people who are in the house much of the day having the TV on as more or less background.
And I'm sure that still drives the numbers. They probably seem really high to me partly because I pretty much only have the TV on if I'm actively watching something. Used to always drive me crazy if I would share a room with someone on a trip and the first they did on entering a hotel room was to turn the TV on.
In my opinion, it's not about amount of time available, it's about scheduling. There seems to be a real aversion in the current generation to committing to doing stuff at a specific date/time. Try to plan an event and get people to promise to show up. Even if they enjoy the event, and know that they will be free, they'll still balk at making that promise.
Perhaps people feel that if they commit in advance, they'll miss out if something more interesting pops up. But nothing more interesting pops up when the day comes around, and you end up watching TV because nobody would commit.
For me, a major "transaction cost" is just picking that flexible date. And after a few failed attempts, which is totally understandable (kids, jobs, eldercare, etc), friendship equity suffers.
I've tried a handful "let's make a date" apps. None really work. Worse, I can't figure out how I'd do better.
One crucial missing feature is shared calendar event updates. For example, you need to push back our lunch 30 minutes, my calendar gets auto updated.
That last one is part of Office 365 as “propose new time”. Of course depends on both of you using that service. Not sure if Google, Apple et. al. have equivalents.
Part of that could also be how TV/Netflix can be in the background. I probably watch a few hours of a random Netflix show over the weekend. But I'm also doing laundry, touching up some hobby code, or just spacing out and drinking my coffee. It kind of falls into place as background noise when my brain doesn't need to be fully occupied by the task at hand.
I couldn't do those things while entertaining a guest. That requires much more mental effort.
In my case, I have the TV on for an hour and a half to two hours, but during that time it's mostly background noise for the rest of my morning routine; maybe 20-30 minutes is actually _watching_ the local news.
When I get home, it's the same: it's _on_ for 3 hours or so, but I'm only paying attention to it about half that time.
So, 5 hours a day, but under half that time is actually watching anything.
I'd like to offer up the concept of the casual home-based "brunch" as the most effective way to spend quality time with your way-too-busy friends. This version of "brunch" happens at someone's house, from, say, noon to 5pm on a weekend day, and people do bring food, but it's a drop-in affair and not a sit-down meal, and showing up without food is also fine.
The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy because you've already set low expectations for providing food or entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them.
Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.
In Vancouver, somehow "brunch" has morphed to a massive obligation. Everyone should bring a dish, all the dishes are high effort, and people secretly hope to skip the whole thing so they don't have to get up at 7am to cook.
Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?
Yes; "dinner parties" have -- in some circles, at least -- become such an exercise in aspirational status-signalling that few of us have the time/energy/inclination to participate.
In our home, it's perfectly OK to have a friend drop in and share a pot of soup, a loaf of bread, and a couple of cheeses from the supermarket. Socializing doesn't have to be elaborate or burdensome.
> the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host.
Or burden the host with getting the ingredients and recipes, and have the guests help with the actual cooking once they arrive. If the dinner party is supposed to be a social event, why not make the cooking part of that event? Social cooking can be fun!
I wonder why it’s so easy for us as people to make problems for ourselves. Surely we could just eat hashbrowns and coffee at McDonalds for $2 and no effort.
My grandma and her friends did this for many years. Every Saturday morning they'd all meet up at McDonalds and nurse a cup of coffee for three or four hours. I think they really had it all figured out: it's about the people, not the accommodations. She's been departed for quite a few years now, but I wouldn't be surprised if her remaining friends are still doing it.
Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?
Yeah, that's the way to do it if you really want to see friends regularly and not Make A Statement about cooking. Stew, slow cooker, something relatively easy. The friends grab a bottle of wine.
It's really not a big deal. You can be fancy if you like but you don't need to be. Prepare some simple dishes and buy pre-made sides, etc. if you want to. People will bring stuff. You can ask them if you like.
Having people over doesn't need to be some major stressor.
isn't this called "catering"? I know some wealthy people who will often have catered food delivered (or prepared on premises) if they're having more than a couple people over and don't feel like cooking. this is also what my office does when they give us free lunch. I think the economics work out in a way where the per-head cost is pretty bad for 10-20 people, but reasonable for ~100 or more.
I think there are different tiers of service that are all called catering. when we get "catered" lunch at our office, they usually just put out a buffet of prepared food and we line up and take what we want. the catering staff will replace trays of food when they're empty and occasionally take your plate if you're finished eating, but that's about it. no idea what it costs per head.
no matter how you slice it, having other people prepare good food (ie, not pizza and wings) for you is relatively expensive. if you expect the food to come to you, it either has to be limited to dishes that travel well and don't suffer from sitting over heat for an hour, or you have to pay even more for people to cook it on location.
There are different tiers. Boston Market will cater which basically means putting their chicken and sides into 10-person party trays rather than individual meals. It's a good way to feed a very low budget wedding.
Tons of restaurants, chains and local, will give you big take-out versions of several of their dishes at a lower per-serving price than they'd normally be. Same thing a company might do to cater lunch for a largish team or smallish business unit. The smart ones will throw in a freebee or two just to make you feel good and want to place a big-ass order with them again in the future. Usually they just need to know a day in advance or something. Pick it up, put it on the table, plates and silverware next to the tubs o' food. Done. Get a shortlist of places your social circle'd like that aren't too far away and call them, probably a few of them are happy to do that (they're a business, after all, and you're offering to give them money for The Thing They Do).
I'd even say aggregate the food costs by offering one big meal for the group (instead of individual meals like a restaurant). As long as you can select by dietary restrictions it would work for most people.
>Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host.
This happened to a friend of mine that hosted dinners for a year or two. The idea would be other people would host it occasionally also, or help with food. Neither of those things ended up happening, so my friend just stopped doing it and nobody else picked it up.
I hosted Saturday pancakes (friends and family) and bimonthly book study group (geeks) for years. I miss both dearly.
About social obligation (other reply's point): after much trial and error, it was just easier if I provided all the food. Hoagies, spaghetti, greek food, whatever's easy. Early birds were "punished" with KP chores.
For study group, I asked for $5 donation per head. Some people always showed up early to help. Most geeks gave more, of course.
I don't like the explanation that everyone "back in the day" had the same schedule. Service jobs still existed back then. Upper middle class (white) people worked 9-5. Women stayed home. The example used was literally the Beaver family.
Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.
Honestly, I think it's the "schedule" of constantly checking your phone every few minutes. _Kids these days_ aren't really interested in learning to drive... because they're on social media crack apps. I'm not saying that the technology (both economic drive and effect) are all that different from the TV culture of the 70s and 80s or even the rise of the internet in 90s and 2ks. However, the effectiveness of the skinner box improves with targeting ease and continuous availability. Hopefully, the youngsters will develop some herd immunity to this disease as well, I don't give the rest of us so much hope.
Exactly my point, I wasn't refering just to kids (even the 16-27 year old kind). I meant all of us who now consume hours of media on our phones. Otherwise, I wouldn't have underscored the _get off my lawn_ aspect of the comment. Clearly, the majority of working stiffs with these issues are not millenial.
Furthermore, yes "these kids" can afford to drive, but would rather someone else do it for them, because the independence of driving is no longer of such high social importance while posting on social media is.
A bit of an outlier situation, but my parents never taught me to drive. Now the problem is not that I dont want to, but theres just no way to learn once you become an adult it seems. Driving school are optimized for teens and not compatible with a full time schedule.
My recently immigrated 57 year old mother in law who speaks almost no English learned to drive last year.
You can too.
First study the driving manual carefully. Most of the knowledge that you need is on there. I'm astonished how poorly non-drivers know the laws of the road (they're largely applicable to them too!). Also the booklet has a lot of techniques relevant to driving (two second separation, add a second for every risk fact, ect).
Now start driving. Get a friend to help you if you have one. Start [0] small, slow, empty, local residential streets and alleyways. Work your way up to more complicated situations.
That's how I learned to ride a motorcycle at age 32 with just the two day MSC course.
[0] Actually the first step is to "drive" with the car turned off. Pretend your driving and then.. BAM! Danger on the road! Can your foot find the breaks? Did they trip instead? Use a timer set to 40s.
You can usually hire a driving school instructor (or ex-instructor) for an hourly fee. About 10 years ago, I spent ~$500 for 12 hours with an instructor, which was money well spent since the in-class course alone was $350 and all we did was watch safety videos for 2 weeks and write a quiz.
I'm not sure how much you would even learn as an adult taking a typical US driving school. What you probably really need is a patient adult with a driver's license who will ride around with you.
There are higher-end driving schools for adults. But most of them are going to assume you already know how to basically drive and they'll be even less compatible with a full-time schedule. (i.e. you'd need to take some vacation time)
Yes, a lot of driving is knowing when to be scared (other than all the time). When you’re in the car with someone just starting it’s terrifying for both parties. Then as the learner, it’s easy to become complacent and think, ‘if I just do the right/legal thing, I’m alright’, but it’s not true because lots of other people break the rules (some situations break the rules!) and you need to coexist without blocking traffic. Lots of things will make an experienced driver nervous not because they’re wrong, but because other people won’t expect it.
For the more advanced (and safe) driving, it’s all about predicting other drivers by recognizing their type and knowing how they will respond. That’s really hard and new/foreign drivers are the most difficult. It’s also what makes driving in other places so hard and occasionally dangerous for experienced drivers... LA is not NY is not Boston is not Berlin is not Naples is not Greece is not Shanghai is not Seoul is not Beijing is not Delhi (I think many people who’ve driven/riden a lot in these places will instantly feel how it is to drive each of these cities).
You have to drive differently in each place so that other drivers (even the ones who are just learning) know what you’re going to do... be predictable and like the other traffic (even if it breaks rules, goes too fast, and gets too close together. I've never driven in Africa or Eastern Europe, but as a passenger it’s terrifying. Other places like Shanghai seem to break the rules in more polite ways that I’m more comfortable with.
To give an example many people will recognize, if you leave ‘too much room’ or drive ‘too slowly’ on a LA freeway other drivers will cut you off in incredibly dangerous ways... you have to ‘move with the flow of traffic’ which often means 15mph over the speed limit with less than a 2 car length gap to the vehicle ahead.
This is true. My parents didn't teach me to drive either. My girlfriend's mom felt sorry for me and spend a lot of time teaching me. Then, after driving for a year, a good buddy of mine taught me to drive stick shift.
A long-ago girlfriend taught me how to drive a stick when I bought a second vehicle that had one. I knew how to drive a stick and my parents had had manual shift cars that I had practiced on a bit but you really need to develop the right feel for the clutch and throttle.
I remember for about the first month making a real point of avoiding routes and times that would expose me to a lot of stop and go traffic, especially on inclines.
I can't imagine what initially learning to drive a stickshift somewhere like SF must have been like!
My friend taught me well. He took me to a cul-de-sac in our neighborhood that went up a steep hill, and I practiced "feathering" the clutch for 30 minutes. After that, the rest was easy.
I think a lot of it was psychological for me :-) I could do it but the idea of having to do it with a car's bumper 6 inches behind me made it more difficult.
I learned to drive at ~24. I think I did 10-12 hours of lessons before I took a test. The driving instructor was cool with showing up at 7am or some time like that and doing an hour of lessons before I had to leave for work. They were also relieved to be teaching an adult (relatively speaking).
> Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends.
Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)
It's interesting to hear that "not having time to make friends" is associated with career growth. All the high achievers I have met specifically carve out time for networking and the best networking usually depends on having an actual personal connection with someone. Even in tech, I have found most of my jobs by invitation which has eased the stress of the interviewing and having to get a foot in the door.
Not really, I suppose my definition of "friend" just must be stricter as I don't consider most people I end up networking with the really be friends. More of acquaintances
For what it’s worth, I willingly took a pay cut for my current job which I enjoy immensely.
This was something I noticed a few years ago when I experimented with using Hired. They let you set your minimum salary. When I set it very high I got matched with companies that I was very disinterested in. When I lowered my minimum salary I heard from a wider range of companies that seemed a lot more compatible with my interests and values.
I did this twice in my career & took jobs at companies that seemed very interesting, but after I joined they had bait & switched me and my job responsibilities were way different than I agreed to, and predictably nobody in HR cared.
I was left with a job I disliked & never had agreed to _and_ making less money than before.
I realized the likes and dislikes, interestingness, culture, etc. can never ever be enforced and can change suddenly. Meanwhile it’s much harder for compensation to change like that.
"I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat" - I share this sentiment but often wonder if it will be the same then as it would be now. I know that time passes more quickly when you are older. That and memories and events become less significant. Perhaps the wise move would be to make as many good memories as possible now while I am younger.
And I somewhat agree, but at the same time, it feels as if I've missed making prerequisite good memories that most people have and that makes it hard to make good new ones. Without any family or friends it just makes sense to put all my time and effort into takinh my career in a direction I (hope) I'll enjoy so that I can salvage at least some resemblance of satisfaction with life.
> Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends.
Lots more ways to spend time without involving other people. TV was always there, but you didn't always have something interesting playing. Now you have on-demand Netflix. You have always-on Internet connections. You are always near your smartphone.
I think for most people, the reliable way to value time is to get put into a situation (e.g. job with long commutes) for a while, and then you're forced to eliminate a lot of the pointless things that were eating your time when you did have the time.
It's a weird cultural thing to some degree, IME. I spent the last couple years either on sabbatical or in a (regrettably) undemanding job, and I've now come back to a pretty challenging high-pressure work environment, where I'm almost getting more responsibility and difficult work thrown at me than I can handle. I absolutely love it, and I do deal with some level of stress, but I've grown to expect a certain amount of me time, and I work a hard 8 hours a day. I know there are people whose workplaces explicitly care about butt-in-seat time and expect after-hours availability, but I know many, many people whose workplaces don't but that still find themselves working all the time. I really don't know how to account for this: all of my friends who do this seem pretty miserable about it, and none of them are in a position where they're so resource-constrained that they need to squeeze more dollars out of their income.
If you look at the actual data, average hours worked has gone down steadily in the US over the past 200 years:
> 1830 69.1 hours per week
> 1880 60.7
> 1929 50.6
> 1988 42.4
> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time.
In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal atomization it unintentionally prmootes.
> wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up
...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have at worst been flat for certain sectors. The vast majority of people have seen inflation adjused wage increases.
The official inflation numbers are useless. Cost of goods is flat, sure (after you include the hedonistic adjustment gimmick), but cost of other's people time has skyrocketed (daycare, teachers, doctors, waiter, plubmer etc.)
I am never sure how to take these "standard of living" claims. In many ways, the world we live in today is nothing like the one that existed 50/60 years ago.
Moved to the Bay Area from LA couple years back.
The Bay area seems like everyone is perpetually overworked and stressed. I take my kids for soccer/basketball lessons, and standing on the sidelines, hope to chat up with parents, but they are glued to their phones or horror of horrors ( some have their laptops open and coding!). LA was so much more chill, just easier to chat up with people, invite people over spontaneously and make friends.
For another anecdotal data point, I grew up in LA, moved here as a teen, and have spent my career here with regular visits back to LA, and haven't found that to be the case. Leisure is so much _easier_ in San Francisco that it's hard to avoid it... Every resident is a maximum ten minute walk away from a park, there are constant awesome free events, and your life isn't fully governed by the dictates of constant traffic between any two points in the city. I've spent my time in the city itself but I've had plenty of exposure to different parts of the Bay and, controlling for the fact that it's less dense, much of the same applies.
The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very easy to avoid IME.
Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're describing is true for that subset of the population.
That's true, am in San Jose( south Bay to be precise).
Every time I miss LA, I head to SFO. The vibe is a lot more chilled out. I would live there, if there were better public schools for kids.
Where I lived in LA, it was a good mix of families and single people.
The downside of LA is that everybody is rather spread out, separated from each other by long commutes in traffic through the sprawl. It's a tough city to make new friends.
I agree, LA has no center. But if you live in either - Los Feliz/Eagle Rock, Sherman Oaks/Studio City, West Holywood, the beach cities, you can make friends who are local.
>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week.
what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.
after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.
the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.
Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for my country hours or on weekends.
This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff.
Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility.
I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less, but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life
There's productivity studies that argue that your skills are as likely to atrophy when overworked (one factor in burn out), and that especially for things like programming skills the best daily skill usage ratio is much closer to 4 hours per day tops than to the 8 hour work day, much less the 12+ hours per day often encouraged in startup culture.
I think what you're working on has a much bigger effect on skill improvement/retention than hours worked, except maybe for retaining large amounts of trivia.
My brother and sister-in-law work for BCG. There are no secrets about what you're signing up for when you take a job there, and they're paid a premium for it. Their clients pay for fast results, and the best way to do that is have employees work long hours. "We have smart people working long hours on your problem" is their entire business model.
Every single person at BCG could easily find another job that turns off at 5:01pm if they wanted to. They choose not to.
From a quick Googling of BCG salaries for Principals, I'm a little shocked at the (relatively) low rates that people are willing to sell all their leisure for, esp assuming that they're generally talented white-collar workers. Though the caveat is that this was a cursory search: the data could be bad or hiding details like TC vs salary.
What particularly made it dystopian to me was the acronym choice. PTO is already the most common acronym to corporate accounting departments for paid time off. Reusing the same acronym for predictable seems to send a dystopian message that paid time off is no longer a norm, and one should just be happy if their time off is predictable.
I'm still not sure that sort of Orwellian new-speak was intentional by Perlow, but I also cannot imagine a world in which a highly paid management consultant is unaware that PTO was already a commonly used acronym.
The problem is that if BCG didn’t work so hard then Bain/McKinsey/Deloitte (or whoever else) are willing to work harder/longer and will steal clients. And if some employees don’t want to work past 5pm well there are plenty of other fresh, young graduates who are willing to work these crazy hours because of prestige and high pay.
I work at an investment bank so I am no stranger to crazy hours. I’ve tried to think of a more sustainable alternative model but I haven’t found a compelling one.
There are plenty of companies with the expectations that you're describing, and nobody is forced to work at Boston Consulting Group or goes in not knowing that it's a long-hours environment. I don't see any problem with BCG being the way it is and other companies being the way they are. Vote with your feet.
Articles like these make me very pessimistic for the future. Not because the article is incorrect, but because the fact this has become such a widespread issue is like a bad joke. If you told me in the 90's that people's work schedules would become so unpredictable that families would start dissolving, I would have called you dramatic. But now, it's happening to basically everyone I know, and only in the last few years have I broken free from that myself.
Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix" this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships with their family and friends?
That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent", which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.
Rentier capitalism results in artificial scarcity. With rentier schemes and behavior dominating aspects of life so fundamental as housing and health care, conditions of artificial scarcity have stretched their tendrils into the fabric of our wellbeing: into our mental, spiritual, social health, into our very sense of having the time to freely work in pursuit of healthy lives.
And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we care about. We are dependent.
Get this guy in front of cspan... artificial scarcity is rarely written about yet its blaring.
Food scarcity is one of the largest perpetrators of artificial scarcity. Massimo Bottura whole model for food for the soul is based on the appalling 30% of food waste he witnessed first hand. If you ever have the pleasure to hear this beautiful man speak, you will understand the little effort, but extreme creativity that goes into combating waste. It is quite sad some chefs throw out half the meat to get the perfect box for the plate. Use the scraps for ‘family meal’ aka staff meal and boom all that waste is gone. Such simple effort is apparently extremely innovative.
We have taken the thanos mindset too far ‘I yield this powerful glove that can do anything, the universe is over populated so destroy half the universe’. It’s so obvious that you can also create double the space. The exponential growth will be the same either way, maybe a couple years lean on the destruction, eventually they will equal out when your curve goes to infinity. It’s like people learned calculus 2 and are like ‘ahaha this is bullshit it has no real world applicability’. No look at your decisions and their consequences, create a curve and measure the area under the curve, see they converge at the same axis and realize regardless of the x shift the curves both converge at the same y. Like that math has an abstract application which should be used for critical thinking application. It is very sad to see people write ‘teach me about finances and taxes calculus is useless’. The very passive application of calculus has helped me go from being in the biggest rut of my life to actually feeling productive in the field.
It’s such a shame how not only is this accepted but is also apparently supposed to be vase case. Any question of use of food is deemed as divergence and handled without care... honest bullshit
What artificial scarcity do you have in mind, bearing in mind that there is a true scarcity (or at least fixed supply) of land close to desirable places to live?
It's become normalized for people to buy houses/condos with large amounts of inflating debt. Because you're indebted, you can't simply sell what you've bought for any less than you owe, eat the loss and walk away, as you might do with something you flat out own. You'd still owe your lender, with interest.
I'd argue that this game creates a significant incentive for people to hold onto a housing units and pass debt onto renters, that it turns would-be owner-occupants into virtual speculators/landlords. I say "virtual" because they are really just tenants of their lenders (banks), and many of them aren't really in it for the "win", they're just in it by coercion, in it for the "not loss".
This whole scheme, and many others like it, artificially restricts supply and inflates prices.
Aka artificial scarcity. Wealthy landowners prevent housing of adequate density being built. Public transport is hard to fund due to the expense driven by negotiating with landholders.
Landowners are creating artificial scarcity; the thing that is not scarce is land; it is habitable spaces proximate to quality employment opportunities.
This is an example of how we are seeing the limits of our Spiral Dynamics stage orange societal systems. In order to remedy these issues we'll have to evolve into a stage green society and it will be fought violently by red/orange stage people like Trump. It will be painful but necessary in order to survive and rescue the ecology of the planet from the consequences of the prosperity that stage orange ushered in.
I'll openly admit that I am an annoying pessimist, but I don't think the solution is going to come in the form of anything that a book from 1995 could possibly recognize as progress.
To be blunt, what I mean is that a lot of problems we have nowadays come from the mere existence of modern technology, not exclusively from just the way people live. It's a bit hard for me to admit because I used to be an avid technologist (and am currently employed as a computer engineer), but it's gets harder and harder to deny everyday. No one in the world gets to choose what technology is the next logical step, and the decision to pursue its development is ultimately an arms race with the entire world as competitors. It is just not possible for any philosophy, economic system, or culture to change that fact. The good side-effects are inseparable from the bad. If you have nuclear energy, you have atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. If you have fast computer networking, you have on-demand entertainment and surveillance networks. If you can store information forever, you can instantly know someone's worst act and they can remember yours.
This is the hermetic principle of polarity in action, but notice that technology and people living their lives are also not separate.
As humanity becomes more conscious it will begin to dawn that none of the life here is separate from any other life and we will move toward Love and unity.
You can see from globalization that we are moving toward a more unified world, it is inevitable if we can survive the consequences of the shadow side of stage orange.
Edit: To clarify, unification of the globe will help to prevent weaponizing technologies, and will lead to unified efforts to preserve and rescue our planets ecology from our excesses. But we have to be high enough on the spiral to implement that, if we're down at the psychological level of totalitarians and then try to implement marxism, we will end up with a totalitarian marxism like Stalin. Stalin wasn't a liberal you know ...
People just have more competing for their time. Endless streaming, phone usage, video games, etc... not only compete with each other, but also with things like hanging out with friends. It used to be that there really wasn't much to do so for better or worse you hung out with people who were close to you geographically. Now, it's much easier to eschew people who are physically close to you, but may not share your exact ideals, for people who you genuinely want to interact with.
I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different than before.
>>>I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing.
One of the side-effects of hanging out with physically-proximate but non-optimized-personality people is that you learn to compromise. You learn to build productive relationships despite differences in temperament and interests.
I think that is largely lost in the digital age. It's part of why we see such uncompromising partisanship in political movements. People are so accustomed to interacting with exactly the sort of opinions/viewpoints they want to experience online that they don't know how to handle anything contrarian when they are in meat-space.
This is a great point I hadn't considered. Interacting with people you do not agree with not only causes one to learn to compromise, but also softens extreme viewpoints.
This would be an argument in favour of the oft-maligned rules about opening hours in the UK, France, etc. (it can be a challenge to buy DIY goods in France on a Sunday, for instance).
If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.
If it's a good thing to ban retail from opening on Sunday, it's also a good thing to do the same to restaurants, transit, and everything excepting emergency services. The UK only restricts retail over 280 m^2, and only in England and Wales—a Scot-lead UK government blocked deregulation in 2006, and more recently Scots did it again.
France is no different; its closing laws also apply only to retail, plus they exempt tourist areas. Germany's exempt train stations. Israel comes closest (at least for Jewish employees), but still allows more than the minimum necessary employment on Saturday; and assuming Benny Gantz forms a government in two weeks the faction who want to impose their religion on everyone else will lose more control.
And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country.
I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.
I wonder how much of it is life phase related essentially. Spending less time with friends when growing up and having responsibilities and being pulled elsewhere was a part of forgotten tropes like the romantic friendship.
Austria. While 'socialist' is certainly no longer true, the labour security we have has been errected during the 70ies and 80ies, when the socialist party reigned with absolute majority.
Most people I know would say that they don't "have friends". It's humorous, but I take that at face value. Because it's certainly my experience as well.
I see my friends almost every night at the gym. We meet up down the pub and have nights out more than once per month too. Often we'll converge on someone's house for a barbecue or just to drink wine and chat shit.
We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.
You earn far more by working a lot more. You use it to pay for housing, education, and healthcare. You are in competition with your peers, who also have increased productivity, so it's a wash at best.
I honestly don't care what they do, how much they make, etc; if they are doing better (financially), great for them.
Myself? I'm what I call "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - I have no unsecured debt, I have no car payments, I use my credit cards wisely and pay off the amount owed monthly if not weekly. The only debt I have is my mortgage, and honestly I could pay it off in full tomorrow if I wanted to.
Many of so-called peers who might be making more, aren't anywhere near as lucky. Some of them I know struggle and live paycheck-to-paycheck. I used to be there myself. I can empathize with the situation.
Buying a house changed all of that. My wife and I changed our financial situation completely. It took a few years of ramen and beans, but we did it. Anyone can do it - but the first step is to stop competing with your peers, and stop trying to "keep up with the Jones".
In the end, when you're dead, you're dead. Nobody is going to say "well, s/he had more than their neighbor/peer over there, at least" - and the fact is, even if they do, you'll be dead; you won't care.
Not parent commenter, but you are competing. You might not compete for the nicest car, but you are competing for housing, healthcare and education. Houses aren't expensive because they are built with gold, but because everyone needs one.
It's not like you can't work fewer hours and have all the things greater productivity offered. But it's also created even more things you can get by continuing to work more, and most people do not feel satisfied living without them
I currently work a three day week. Finding somewhere that let me do this was not easy. There were rather few places willing to do it and I took a pretty big pay cut (on top of earning 40% less by working 40% less, I mean). I don't think I'll be able to sustain it indefinitely, financially speaking. Maybe I can find somewhere for 4 days for less of a pay cut (or increase my hours here).
So, I wouldn't say "no one will ever employ you at 30%", but its definitely not easy and it does come with a cost beyond what the fewer hours would suggest.
first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim. shift work pays by the hour for however many hours you work (and possibly overtime), and most of these jobs don't expect you to work full-time. in fact, they might prefer that you don't. you're probably not gonna get an aeron chair and a mechanical switch keyboard though.
even in software, there are people working less than full-time. there was a thread about this just the other day.
This is exactly it. We can get the same standard of living we had 50 years ago while working a hell of a lot less than we did 50 years ago. But of course nobody wants to live that way (myself included).
I wonder how this true this sentiment actually is. For instance, my house was built in the twenties. Other than internet and a television (which are hardly bank breaking expenses), living in this home is not meaningfully different than it would have been in the 50s. All of my
major expenses are things that would have been accessible (if cheaper, eg college education) in the 1950s. Cutting all modern luxuries from my life would hardly move the needle on my ability to “work a hell of a lot less”.
No. This is a myth. Check costs of various expense segments against net salaries and you will see how much certain areas have changed.
Insane example: just the average cost of processing the legally required paperwork for partitioning and buying a plot and get all permits to build is higher for me today than it was for my grandfather in 1960 to buy the land and all materials to build a house. As measured in net income - hours of work after taxes. And I'm in a higher income bracket than he was.
I'm not sure that's true any more at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. People I know are having a very difficult time covering just rent, electricity, food, and transportation for a family of 4 on a dual full-time income.
After cutting basically everything else except the cellphone bill because you basically can't get by in the modern world without a phone and an internet connection. (And that replaces the landline bill they would have had a few decades back.)
That only works if only a few people decide to work more, since in capitalism prices/wages are set by the marginal rate. So if everyone works more, wages just go down, till no one is actually any better off.
On average, we are earning more. It's just that one of "us" has earned over a hundred billion dollars in the past couple of decades, which drags the average up a bit.
>> "edit: before the downvote storm, have a look at"
I'm as down on capitalism as anyone, but one of HN's very good guidelines is that you should be more thoughtful and substantive as the topic gets more divisive. Dropping the word "capitalism" in response to someone asking what's wrong on a forum full of capitalists is never going to go well.
Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling, gossiping, gaming in some way, etc.
But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.
>>>But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.
How much of that is due to demographic changes in the Western professional class? Asia still knows how to mix business with pleasure.
A thing we've found very helpful is if something ends up working out well time / place-wise, just suggest doing the same thing again next week. It's like building any new habit. You have to be very intentional about it to start with, then it becomes easy.
LOL, this is just called getting older. As you get older, it gets harder to make new friends, harder to see your existing friends. I suspect it's always been this way.
Nah. My father and grandfather's generation had regular community and social groups to attend - usually very regularly. Lions Club, Rotary, Townswomen's Guilds, Women's Institutes, Working Men's clubs - often tied to the ship yard or other major works. Dozens of others, some tied more to place, church or community than others, but all roughly performing some combination of social and doing worthy works.
They were hooked into the fabric of society enough that they contributed to social care, elder care, welfare, special needs and a whole selection of other roles that modern government have placed on the individual. Spun as giving "choice", the intent was to remove that bedrock foundation.
The removal of that foundation was as much part of 80s monetarism/neoliberalism as deregulation or privatisation. We gained individualism and private everything, and lost all the community resources that glued those individuals together.
My first suspicion upon reading this was that some writer or editor observed that they weren't getting together with friends as much as they used to and spun a story with some plausible theories and anecdotes out of it.
The real answer may be as simple as they got a bit older, people they know got busy with partners, family, kids, etc. and tend not to be available on random nights and weekends.
I'm willing to believe that there are meta-trends which have caused shifts in how and how much people socialize in addition to this but I'd need to be convinced.
No, I come from a country where having friends is not strange at any age. The US are weird and can't put my finger on it but I never felt so detached. I will definitely leave when I'm done working, I hate the lifestyle here, it's so hollow and boring.
I see you're greyed, but I think you're getting at a deeper point.
There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes.
There are only so many places in good schools, whether it be good public districts or private (fee-paying) schools. You now have to compete with your friends for places there.
The introduction of fake scarcities was needed when we discovered how to produce more wealth than we could possibly actually need (about 280k per person in the US, per recent NYtimes article). This way you still work to enrich capital owners instead of enjoying the fruits of your labour.
This sounds a lot like people living in New York all their life and saying that the planet is overpopulated and that there is no space left.
What you are saying might apply to the bay area, but it doesn't apply to almost anywhere else. No one is entitled to live in the most desirable places on earth.
You could live almost anywhere else and not have the same problems.
Well, that's a fair point, though I would suggest "bay area" could be "city with good jobs and strict controls on housing creation through zoning, density maximums, parking minimums, etc.".
You're completely right though. I'd had enough and moved to a dirt cheap house in the middle of a field in the country. Not having a mortgage or rent does wonders for the ability to not check emails/Slack on weekends.
There are hundreds of thousands of homes and tens of thousands of school slots. The chance that you were denied a resource specifically because one of your friends got it is so incredibly low as to be irrelevant. If you actually feel that the presence of your friends is keeping you from achieving life goals... your problem is much, much deeper.
tbh I don't think this is very compelling. my coworkers are certainly my competition for raises/promotions, but the company is large and successful enough that everyone I'm friendly with could get a raise and there would still be money to give me one too.
outside of work, the scale just makes this an irrelevant question. sure, maybe there are 10,000 apartment units I would like to live in and 20,000 people who also want them. my five good friends in the area don't really move the needle wrt how much I need to bid to actually get a nice apartment.
the incentive is there, but it's too weak to be worth paying attention to.
My point is very simple - if you have 10,000 people and 1,000 homes, you must compete with those 10,000 people. 10 of them might even be your friends, competing for that same home.
If we allowed building 9,000 more homes, you no longer have to compete just to get a roof over your head (though you may still do so to get a _nicer_ home) and you have the ability to tell your boss where to shove it when he asks you at 8:30 AM Monday why you didn't answer his Sunday night email.
But we don't allow building more homes, at least in California, where homebuilding has fallen far, far, FAR below population growth. If you aren't on Slack all the time, you'll miss out on promotions to your coworker (who, I concede, may not literally be your pal) who will then outbid you for the house you want.
Additionally, where you _are_ allowed to build housing tends to be a long ways from jobs (see: suburban sprawl) so you have the double whammy of work pressure to never really sign off, and a long commute.
I think understand your point, I just feel that the scale mismatch is so large that it doesn't really matter that much in day-to-day socializing.
I understand that I'm in competition with n other people to get a specific apartment, but I'm not likely to actually encounter any of these people unless it's in the waiting room at the leasing office.
I agree that I'm competing with people like me and my friends for housing, food, etc. I just don't see that as necessarily an impediment to helping, being kind to, and/or befriending strangers. it's an important issue, but orthogonal to what we are discussing here imo. maybe it affects your social interactions differently.
You could, you know, live somewhere that's not so crowded. If you choose not to take advantage of what mobility you have, well, don't act so surprised.
Yes, this is extremely insightful. Our society should be, at any post-1960 tech levels, effectively post-scarcity. Murray Bookchin discussed this in [Post-Scarcity Anarchism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Scarcity_Anarchism) in 1971.
post-scarcity of what? we do have enough food in aggregate, but do we have the logistics to actually get it to everyone? would food for everyone look anything like what I actually want to eat? don't we already use too much energy?
we're certainly not post-scarcity wrt NYC apartments.
That's the point though. Housing is constrained by policy, not any intrinsic limitation. NYC is an imperfect example but imagine if you wanted to tear down houses in Berkeley and put up apartments to meet demand. You're forbidden from doing this by law.
Capitalism is government by the owners of capital; under capitalism markets are normally distorted to the benefit of owners of capital (sometimes individually, sometimes as a class). The state is one tool used for this.
I had a good childhood and decent teenage years with very few but really good and precious friends, those memories will forever stay as a warm bonfire in my heart at which i can rest during whatever coldness i might face in reality. In my view as a Zoomer, barely seeing the people you treasure anymore is just a part of being an adult, you have to go out there and face the world with everything you got and sometimes you meet good people on your road with which you can share a moment with before you have to head out again. That's just life.
The world is worthless. "Everything you got" is usually not enough. Good people are hard to come by.
Treasure those precious friends of yours. They're actual people who care about you. They will have your back when memories can't. And sometimes you'll have to inconvenience yourself to have their backs too. That is life. Or at least a life that is worth living.
A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.
Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption