I believe in similar things. Here, where I currently live, we spend so much time working and being productive that we forget to ask questions. "Why am I doing this?" "What is the meaning of it?" "What is really important?" Then we end up lost, depressed and what not. Not all of us do, but some? Certainly. We do it because others do it. Because we believe that pursuing a different venue is not realistic. Others have that? Hell, I should have it too.
"I should totally run a startup."
Anyways, it happened to me. Went to SEA for four months. Dreamed. Life is amazing. I can do whatever I want. I don't need money to live. yadi. yada. Then you come back, and no one understands you. You are a hippy. I'm not.
In periods of doubt, I write things down. Then I remember what I believe. Then I remember I'm going back soon. That it is what I should be doing.
Being productive is ok. It's fun. But, in the end, it's not important. People are. At least, that's the conclusion I came to.
I'm a recent immigrant to USA, and while I don't presume to know everything about American culture, your comment and this article really resonate with my observations in the time I've spent here.
There is a consistent message pervasive in the culture - you are worth what you produce. You are defined by what you produce. Productivity is the currency that buys you respect in society. I've met many many people who rise above this view, but as a society, this is prevalent. Everything has to be about "winning" in some way - even if you are working out, or playing a game, you gotta "play hard", compete, kick the other guys ass, not feel sorry for yourself, not mope, just WIN. Forget about what you're winning, what or why you produce, as long as you produce more than the other guy. Other cultures may use wisdom, or age, or kindness as currencies for respect/status in society.
And then people wonder why society is becoming increasingly isolated. See, when you tie your worth to what you produce, you must give up everything to produce. EVEN IF "producing" means painting a beautiful portrait in your garage, the compulsion to produce is the problem. It makes people focus too hard on themselves and how they can improve/level-up. Too focused inward to see the people around you and their lives, and the joy that can bring. That isolation leads to addiction, depression, isolation and all manner of mental illness. Because humans have evolved to be social creatures. It is hardwired in our nature. We cannot and should not try to fight that. We should not view that as a sign of weakness or an obstacle to productivity, or money, or fame, or any other idol.
Sometime I wonder about the "meaning of life", but the real question is "what is the purpose of civilization?".
Cynics could argue that civilization is like a cancer, thus we should make sure civilization grows as fast and as big as possible to survive a cataclysm or to make sure one's country wins a future war.
That's the only argument to have higher standards and incentives to be productive, just so that society can be fatter and faster. There is no incentive to be happier at all when you want to be the strongest. Modern, developed capitalistic societies is just about scoring money. You just can't be happy in a society like this, because everything, to economical policies to the customs, are now made towards bigger faster stronger.
Sometimes it seems that the poverty and the crisis of the 30s scared one generation, and set a whole mentality of never being poor and unproductive ever again. Economics and scoring are now the highest priority. We're not individuals, we're just scores.
There used to be multiple civilizations. There still are, but there are less of them. Connecting the world is turning us into a monoculture, and as biologists know, monocultures are extremely vulnerable to diseases wiping them out.
I think we should encourage localized micro-civilizations, if only to keep the species safe. For example, capitalism has become the system that the world runs on. Pretty much all of us exchange currency for goods. But there are lots of failure modes for this system. To keep ourselves safe, we should encourage enclaves with alternative economic systems like bartering and collectivism.
Unfortunately, in the US at least, if someone suggests that capitalism might not be the best for everybody, they get labeled as a "socialist" and shunned.
Do you think communism, in some way, was a different form of civilization, and that the fall of the berlin wall increased this phenomenon of "monoculture" ?
Yeah, I think so. I'm not a fan of communism as it was practiced by the USSR, but I think in smaller communities that collectively agreed to it, it would work.
This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does.
First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison used absolute instead of per-capita values. India and Canada may produce the same amount of wealth, but India has 35 times more people. Of course per-capita GDP doesn't fully capture quality of life, but it's easy to measure and hard to fake. That's why it's used.
Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!
Many people, especially in technology, say their productivity is changing the world, and this is irrefutable. But no one seems to know what they’re changing it into, because no one can measure the world. When no one can measure the world, how much can it really exist?
This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it. Maybe a lot of people are measuring the wrong things. Maybe they're missing or underweighting a factor. Maybe they just have different preferences than the author. But to suggest that the entire enterprise is bunk is to disregard centuries of progress across a dozen fields of study.
If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't
spending it right.[1]
If you're attempting to find a productive rhetorical truth in a piece about shedding productivity as a focus, you're missing the point.
In fact, you're arguing that she should 1) be able to quantify happiness, 2) consider life-expectancy as a proxy for life quality, and 3) pursue optimizing life by quantifying and measuring it. I think you're missing many points.
The whole idea—the wisdom, if you will—is that you lose an extremely precious thing by focusing on measurement and optimization and increasing quantity and productivity. She has an extremely clear and valid point, which lucidly carries so much truth in it, and is not particularly hindered by slight rhetorical mistakes or lack of clarity. It's that true.
In fact, the clarity and style and beauty of this piece remarkably matches almost exactly how it feels. It's so confusing and seemingly contradictory and paradoxical, yet we know it's true. Even so, no one knows what, exactly, to do with it; so we call it unproductive and go on trying to live our highly productive lives. It's so much bigger than we are, this thing, and resistance seems futile.
And this is when you begin looking into Zen, and things become clearer and muddier at the same time, but you have a fleeting chance, at least, of converging on the ability to hold a thing in your head that's both true and false at the same time, and come just a bit closer, thereby, to the reality of things.
> and is not particularly hindered by slight rhetorical mistakes or lack of clarity. It's that true.
Clearly it is hindered by bad writing and rhetoric, because here we are not agreeing with it.
>It's so confusing and seemingly contradictory and paradoxical, yet we know it's true.
Speak for yourself.
>converging on the ability to hold a thing in your head that's both true and false at the same time
That's not impressive. It's called "being inconsistent" and sometimes "being an idiot". A more impressive ability is being able to simulate multiple outcomes in your head without necessarily believing in them, and that has nothing to do with whatever religious dogma you're preaching.
You've touched on a trend I've noticed. A lot of Zen preachers on HN abuse their misunderstanding of QM to attack the PEM and other principles. I've heard "light is both a particle and a wave! Zen:1 Logic:0" quite a few times.
"We" are not here not agreeing with it. You are here not agreeing with it, and clearly another group of people agrees with it quite strongly. I agree it could be clearer, but it does not follow that a point that is not clearly made is not true at its core. A thing does not need to be argued successfully to be true: the truth of the thing exists first.
Absolutely, with prejudice, I reject the principle of excluded middle—if not based on mathematics, then for its societal impact on the way we think about the world and ourselves. I think a three- or four-valued logic (yes/no/maybe or yes/no/both/neither) applies to reality better and helps humans understand complexity as it really is, while a two-valued logic nearly always oversimplifies and causes direct harm to ideas and how they spread and are discussed.
In general I have no patience for those who think in binary.
I never made this claim. I reject your claim that "we know [the author's claims to be] true". I don't know them to be true. In fact, I think them to be false.
>A thing does not need to be argued successfully to be true
This is true, of course. But neither your nor the author have proven the truth of what you are saying. You've just flung dogma at us, sans evidence.
>I reject the principle of excluded middle—if not based on mathematics, then for its societal impact on the way we think about the world and ourselves.
Just because you wish something to be true does not make it true.
You may be uncomfortable with the consequences of the truth of the PEM, but that is not an argument against its truth.
Do you have any evidence contradicting the PEM? I'd love to hear it.
>In general I have no patience for those who think in binary.
Why? Because the truth of the PEM would mean you're wrong?
I don't much care about myself being wrong. I care that the conclusions of the type of black and white rhetoric you pursue are the very same that are driving society into ever more harmful separation, for ever less logical reasons, all under the simple concept that if something is not true, it must be false.
What I mean is, the high complexity of most systems in nature and society and humanity about which we argue necessarily dictate that a statement cannot be absolutely false without variance, or absolutely true without variance. There are too many inputs and variables, for a logician let alone a layperson to make sense of. Yet the dichotomy of the PEM (or thinking akin to that) is applied even in those cases. It has become not only a logical statement, but a way of life and a way of thinking, and it far overreaches its definition.
Thus, I don't care if the PEM is an irrefutable mathematical truth or not. That is irrelevant, and it is not what I'm arguing. I argue that it does not apply to most situations of the real world, and following it when it should not be followed leads to mistaken conclusions. We see this played out presently in politics, society, and in our own lives; as this article describes.
The real question is not whether the mathematics of the PEM hold true (they do), but whether the type of thinking they lead to is beneficial to humanity. And about that I am allowed to have opinions and make an argument. My opinion is that it is detrimental to humanity, and my argument is that most places where a binary or dichotomous argument is used are too complex for it to apply cleanly, yet we ignore that major problem and continue anyway. This leads to false conclusions and actions within complex systems.
I continue to have no patience for those who think in binary, because it is inhuman, selfish, and irritating; not because it is untrue, but because it is an incredibly poor way to interact with other human beings, and an unproductive way to approach complexity.
> And this is when you begin looking into Zen, and things become clearer and muddier at the same time [...]
I hope you take this the right way, but this position is very California-ized pseudo-Zen. Many of the most well-regarded Zen practitioners and teachers very much would have savaged it, EX:
> "One of Hakuin's major concerns was the danger of what he called "Do-nothing Zen" teachers, who upon reaching some small experience of enlightenment devoted the rest of their life to, as he puts it, "passing day after day in a state of seated sleep". Quietist practices seeking simply to empty the mind, or teachers who taught that a tranquil "emptiness" was enlightenment, were Hakuin's constant targets. In this regard he was especially critical of followers of the maverick Zen master Bankei. He stressed a never-ending and severe training to deepen the insight of enlightenment and forge one's ability to manifest it in all activities. He urged his students to never be satisfied with shallow attainments, and truly believed that enlightenment was possible for anyone if they exerted themselves and approached their practice with real energy."
Hakuin, who is pretty damn amazing and certainly lived an amazing life by almost anyone's standards, wrote that after achieving some basic glimpses enlightenment, you ought to be out helping people and doing good things.
You'll see that in non-priest Zen practitioners, too. Miyamoto Musashi's ink paintings show such a depth of clarity and a sort of both sad and beautiful aliveness:
In any event -- I think Hakuin, Musashi, Dogen, etc all would reject "clearer and muddier" intellectualism in favor of actually practicing and doing worthwhile things:
Dogen: "To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life."
Anyway, I mean this with all the most respect. The Zen practitioners that really stand the test of time and made a difference in their communities are ones that saw it less as an intellectual orientation, and much moreso as a very actionable way of life.
This I agree with completely, but you must recognize the need for a stepping stone when speaking to people who are otherwise totally ignorant of Zen, and also the fact that with this set of ideas, surely it is not a maximization effort: even a moderate comprehension of Zen is better than nothing. Some would say that this does not exist, but I have personally experienced great benefit from the way of thinking if not fully the way of life, and I know others have a chance to as well.
In other terms, it is very difficult to sell a way of life, but people readily accept one small idea in that direction. I very much respect what you have written and know it to be true, but I also believe that the intellectual part of zen, while surely not complete at all, has so many useful and real benefits that it can't be ignored, and it makes a fine introduction. Whatever the destination, the western mind needs some convincing.
However, I have taken to heart what you have said and I will further my learning by going and doing.
Edit: After some thought, I do want to re-iterate that I think there are two realizations (not close to enlightenment, or to Zen, per se, but related) that I think are relevant to this discussion: that reality is paradoxical, and that one of those paradoxes is that often effort in a certain direction is inversely proportional to success. We often find what we're looking for when we're not looking for it, and we often hit the target when we're least trying to.
The major realization is that these are not just silly anecdotes or trivialities, but a core part of life itself and what it means to be human. They are very important, and the original article shows a manifestation of those ideas in a very clear and human way without identifying them exactly.
Chiefly, the author is arguing against productivity as an ends to itself, but also against the reduction of human endeavors down to more easily digestible quantities. In essence, against measuring out our lives with coffee spoons.
The author also argues that time she had previously considered wasted ended up being more fruitful than the prevailing culture would have us believe possible. This is, I think, the important message. The mind is often working when we are not consciously aware of it, and to discount leisure time not spent checking tasks off a todo list as having been wasted is not only tediously anal but also simply false.
I disagree with you. I thought it was very clear and well written.
> Of course per-capita GDP doesn't fully capture quality of life, but it's easy to measure and hard to fake.
It's extremely easy to fake. I sell you a backrub for 10.000 dollars and after that I buy one from you for 10.000 dollars and we've now in 10 minutes boosted our GDP with 20.000 dollars.
> Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it.
Which is what he is talking against. We are too focused on optimizing, when a lot of what it means to be a human are things that shouldn't be optimized. And secondly, long periods without productivity may actually be the foundation of later quality. And you can't optimize these unproductive periods.
It's extremely easy to fake. I sell you a backrub for 10.000 dollars and after that I buy one from you for 10.000 dollars and we've now in 10 minutes boosted our GDP with 20.000 dollars.
I didn't want to sidetrack my comment by getting into PPP and other adjustments[1], but suffice it to say that economists have been aware of these issues for over a century.
We are too focused on optimizing, when a lot of what it means to be a human are things that shouldn't be optimized. And secondly, long periods without productivity may actually be the foundation of later quality. And you can't optimize these unproductive periods.
Even if your hypothesis is true (which I doubt), it still makes sense to measure and improve leisure. I think the old quote from Steven Levy's Hackers[2] is worth remembering:
At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." It was the most profound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and from then on Sussman was hooked.
Our time on this planet is short, and there are no do-overs. There are certainly diminishing returns to improving aspects of one's life, but giving little thought to them or leaving things to chance is a great way to ensure we don't make the most of it.
Let's say all deers get sick and the price of deer meet rises substantially. Is the living standards of the swedes now falling compared to the danes who do not consume deer meet? Or do the swedes just switch the deer meet for some other kind and enjoy the same standard of living as always?
My iphone has many many times the computing power of my old (but back then high-end) Nokia phone, but cost me twice as much. Am I now poorer in PPP because a good cellphone is more expensive or am I richer because my cellphone is faster?
PPP is extremely easy to fake.
The point of the post is that (A) the obsession with optimizing will harm us and (B) most optimization is done for the sake of optimization.
Maybe instead of saying "optimizing is bad", a better idea is to remember that you can't just "optimize". You always optimize for something: You're trying to bring a certain quality into an extreme, usually by willingly trading it off against other qualities - e.g. free time against a higher income.
Therefore, optimisation isn't bad, but you should always keep in mind what you're optimizing for, as you usually can't optimize everything at the same time.
If you have two qualities that are mutually exclusive but both important to you, you obviously wouldn't want to optimize either of them - you'd try to find a balance between them instead.
Gosh, yes. What if you died having not measured, optimized, and made the most of your leisure. How awfully guilty and ashamed you can presently imagine your future dead self would feel if you picture dead-you actually alive in an afterlife somewhere.
> This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it.
In Notes from Underground the hero attains his own measure of happiness through spite, i.e. self harm, i.e. misery. Any measure of human happiness is contradictory, or it wouldn't be human. Try to imagine the most perfect utopia you can, where any measure you come up with is maximized, or optimized (to use the SV parlance). Then think if people would really be happy in such a place. Even if your measure includes just the "right amount" of misery, it would still be wrong, because, by virtue of its reality, it will no longer be optimal.
If I were pressed to come up with one ultimate measure for human happiness, it is this: people are happy when they have what they don't have. Now optimize this. Of course, under this measure, people's happiness is constant at zero, but there are other (smaller) terms in this formula that basically amount to compromise :)
I am sure you can appreciate the constant inner conflict of the human condition. Apparently you can't measure soul.
You can have my Humanity Card, because that's a complete load of crap. You don't need to always drive yourself to misery wanting what you don't have, especially because, if you know you're not going to enjoy it when you get it, you can simply stop wanting it.
Bloody hell, give me three months of vacation time to spend at the beach and I can make a solid start on coming up with an ideal way to spend the rest of my life. It's just a matter of resources.
You completely misunderstood me. I'm not saying that you always drive yourself to misery wanting what you don't have, just that human happiness is often a very complicated thing, and not one that should be viewed first through the SV prism of "optimization".
> if you know you're not going to enjoy it when you get it, you can simply stop wanting it.
Actually, Daniel Kahneman has spent the last few decades showing that that's exactly what people do: they want something that they know will make them happy, but once they get it, it doesn't make them as happy as they thought, and they want something else[1]. It is called the focusing illusion and Kahneman summarizes it as "nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it." Stupid, I know, but that's how our particular species of apes actually behaves, and this is a lot more rooted in reality than optimizing happiness.
Aside from the focusing illusion, Kahneman demonstrates that people's tastes change over time, and you might not even want what you want now by the time you get it.
Again, this all simply shows that human happiness is complicated; not that anyone knows exactly how it works.
You're optimizing the wrong thing if you're looking outside of the human mind. Change the behavior surrounding our desires and happiness and you solve many of these problems.
You might say changing the way our minds work is very difficult, but surely it's easier than attempting to create an impossible utopia.
There are numerous drugs which make people feel subjectively happy by changing the way their mind works, however from the outsider perspective the outcome is hardly desirable.
People are inherently irrational just like the nature itself. It is possible to predict the probable outcome using mathematical models here and there, but the solution is always local and temporary.
An extremely common misconception. Human nature does not mean that our behavior is permanent, set in stone, fixed. Our biological bugs are not our humanity, nor are our biological advantages. We are quite greater than our biology, and we've proven again and again that we are capable of improving upon it.
I'll just throw the whole institution of "education" out there as an example.
Well, that's a deep philosophical question of whether there's an essence to humanity. But I think that if by some miracle we can turn humans into rational beings, then our entire set of motivations, aspirations and drives will change. Education does not do that. So far, over the course of history, we have not changed any of what people may call "our nature".
We have turned humans, largely, into much more rational beings than they were in the past. Education and progress does do that, most clearly. There is always human nature, but in the most educated societies, you see a completely different behavioral state.
I think most historians would disagree with you. Actually, there's one quite famous study that touches on this topic, The Civilizing Process[1] by Norbert Elias. It is a fascinating work, but debated by most historians. One interesting subtopic there is the internalization of the feeling of disgust. Elias shows how disgust -- which we often experience physiologically -- is a social construct that evolved through the ages.
Other than that, it is well accepted that some societies have built large, faceless institutions, and evolved from a face-to-face society to a society of strangers. It is a profound change, but no one claims that such a society is more rational than a face-to-face, let alone its members. The behavioral state you're referring to is largely accepted to be nothing more than social norms in a society of strangers.
We have trained people to behave in a mode that appears rational, when examined from the framework of their culture. But that's always been true - even prehistoric people survived according to how well adapted their myths and behaviors were to their environment.
I didn't make up the rules :) That weird situation is what most art of the past few centuries is about (i.e. once we've pretty much nailed basic survival down), and it's really not that bad, just... peculiar. But if you think about it, it makes sense: you have this species that evolved through increasing brain function, rather than speed, strength or built-in weaponry, which then managed to reduce survival issues to a few hours a day. How does that brain behave when it's got so much free time and so little to actually worry about? Is there any reason to believe that "rationality" will be how it does it? Decades of psychological research have shown that the human brain had been tuned for survival in ways that are anything but rational.
I would say that people are happy when they have what they want. The great thing is, there are 2 variables there, and you can control either one. Most people try to change the "what you have" variable, but it's easier to change the "what you want" variable.
Note that the author partly justifies it by the writing she produced later, which wouldn't have happened without her "unproductive" time.
Applied to programming, it seems to me the author is against measuring lines of code per day, and in favor of going for long walks and letting solutions pop into your head that don't require so much code. Or longer walks that cause you to realize the whole program is bunk and you ought to be building something different. It's pretty difficult to measure the productivity of this sort of thing (except perhaps after a lot of hindsight), but it can have a huge effect on your long-term results.
Richard Feynmann wrote about this. He got burned out trying to be scientifically productive, started screwing around, got curious about the physics of something trivial, and ended up figuring out something important.
> First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP.
A common theme of the article is measurement, value, and the measurement of value. Does Canada create the same 'value' as India? The notion seems preposterous, as how can a country 1/35th the size of another produce the same value - the author directly questions what 'value' is, as a measurement of something called 'productivity'. The entire article is a critique of what productivity is.
> The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!
It is not disparaged, quite the opposite. The author highlights that Japan measures (again, a theme of measurement) the number of deaths by overwork, and pretty explicitly and bluntly states that some other countries do not (and sarcastically concludes it must therefore not exist in those countries).
> Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it. Maybe a lot of people are measuring the wrong things.
I agree. I believe the author is questioning what needs to be optimised and what is optimal. Before that, measurement has no scope, and what is currently optimised for 'productivity' may not be productive (excuse my pun).
I feel like many Americans (assuming you're American) have a knee jerk response when they're told that money cannot buy them happiness. They get defensive as our society constantly reinforces us with the idea that money does in fact purchase happiness. This is a great message to keep us productive and increase GDP, but is it really true? You've presented that journal article as evidence, but looking past the catchy title, it still does not show that money = happiness. It says that money, when used to purchase experiences or help other people, brings about happiness. If anything, this seems to imply that experiences and helping others brings about happiness, and money is a means in which we can help others or experience things. However, excess wealth is hardly a pre-requisite for experiences nor helping others. Certainly, there exists a baseline; if you're struggling to get food, you probably can't focus on helping others, but there's nothing stopping you from deciding to quit your job, emigrate to a foreign developing country, and start working at a non-profit (sans debt obligations, of course, which tends to be the result of a horrible education system and/or rampant consumerism). I remember meeting an Australian engineer in Montreal who worked for a year and then took two or three off to go travel around the world. He especially liked to snowboard. Yes, productivity and wealth were necessary for him, but it was a means to an end; so that he could purchase experiences that made him happy. I feel like many people in our world would look at him and say "but what about your career progression? Dear god man, don't you have any ambition? You'll never become CTO like that!" I feel like our society has gotten sucked into a rat race, where it treats productivity and the accumulation of wealth as the end itself rather than the means to happiness. Nothing better signifies this than our obsession with GDP.
I do, however, agree with you that the article is poorly organized, rambles in random directions, and fails to present any actual argument.
> Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!
I am pretty sure that the agricultural, traditional type lifestyle of Okinawa(which is the region which has the famed life expectancy) is nowhere near the same as the lifestyle in Japan's urban cities where that workaholic ethic is.
"Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!"
I had seen as many workaholics in the USA as in Japan. For different reasons, and in different ways.
In the US you are supposed to do it because of ambition, in Japan you do it because of social pressure or constriction of the environment.
Oh, never mind, in the US they have this beautiful two words that describe everybody: Loser or Successful, that does wonders to social pressure people to work more, but thinking "they actually want it", like in Japan, anyway.
But food is much better in Japan. They also eat a lot of fish that before Fukusima, was the less toxic or industrialized food you could eat. No artificial feed(until recently), no genetically modified, no antibiotics, no hormones like US loves so much.
The US doesn't love it, the food industry does because it allows them to produce higher volumes of food and sell it for lower prices, which (by extension) the consumer loves. I'd like to think people in Japan care more about the quality of their food, not so much the quantity per $ like I see in the US ($1 cheeseburgers and such). Another possibility is that the Japanese have more expendable income (also because of 12+-hour workdays), thus more budget for food, thus less of an inclination to buy the cheapest products.
Re: "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right", that's the cheeky title of the article you link to, but not really the content of it. The article discusses how to get the best bang for your buck when spending your money. It may still be the case, however, that the best happiness bang for your buck is to do something with your free time other than seeking above all else to maximize your income in the first place, and the article is not intended to exclude this possibility.
> The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!
There is a huge unbalance between men and women (which traditionnaly don't get the same chances to work in high pressure environments, and are less subjected to karoshi) and as someone else point Okinawa people won't have the same life expectancy as Tokyo area people.
This is a factor in the juxtaposition of workaholism and high quality of life in the same country.
Even though some valuable ideas are expressed in this piece, there's a lot of conflation of highly distinct social phenomena that goes on. The author looks at the notion of "productivity", judges that people blindly rush from birth straight to the grave in the pursuit of being "productive", somehow lops that in with GDPs (not per capita, not at PPP?) and the weird way in which we have industrialized pleasure, and concludes... what, exactly?
Regardless, the author expresses a valuable point that suffers from her conflating topics.
I think that point is that there's a certain industrial culture -- a focus on productivity and structure -- that dominates our lives, whether in work or in leisure (see e.g. tourism). I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it's important to be aware of it.
Some people do indeed wear blinders as they race through life, being as productive as they can -- not for themselves, but maybe for society. Or for their boss. Or for someone else, whose interests are not necessarily aligned with their own. Maybe that's a good reminder to carefully define productivity for yourself, however you see fit. The idea here is to have a notion of productivity to strive for that is well-aligned with doing things that make you feel good for the time invested. And then we're right back down to those age-old platitudes, so obvious and ubiquitous that we forget their truth: "spend your time wisely."
I don't really know why you're getting downvoted. That's a great answer to the question.
The article is about how we over-analyze and over-optimize and look for a distinctly obvious purpose in everything in an effort to ensure productivity. I think it's funny that most of the comments here are doing exactly that with the article -- trying to analyze it, refute it, and determine the exact conclusion the author is trying to state. Should we stop being over-productive? Be less productive? Try to find balance? Maybe we should simply continue to pursue productivity, but at least understand what we're doing, rather than pursuing it blindly?
Honestly, it's probably some combination of the above -- and it's probably subjective and dependent on the reader. The author doesn't simply state the conclusion -- because there is no obvious conclusion to the article. It's just a bunch of observations that allow the reader to reach a conclusion him/herself.
I liked this essay, but it's also important to point out that GDP is very strongly correlated with health outcomes like life expectancy. It might be that we are starving our souls, but let's not forget about the fairly serious consequences of starving our bodies.
I don't mean to say that I disagree with the conclusion, just that I think the historical context is missing something. We didn't become productive out of greed, we became productive out of hunger. That attitude has run its course, absolutely, and we need to ask: we're not hungry anymore, so what now?
But let's not denigrate how we got here on the assumption that it was never a good idea. We might have climbed past the lowest rungs of the ladder, but that doesn't mean we didn't need them. Indeed, there are many who still do.
Then how you explain the fact that USA has one of the lowest life expectancy among the developed world?
I think that what the author tries to explain is that, in some places, societies have gone too far in the seek of productiveness and, ironically, people there is less happy and healthy.
I guess finding the good balance is more important than trying to be the number one.
Why is this downvoted? Given that the US is as economically powerful as it is, why _is_ life expectancy lower [0], compared to other _developed_ nations? Check out Canada, Australia, Japan and West-Europe on the map.
"Above all we become interesting [sic] in measuring ourselves. Word count/day, lines of code/day, hamburgers served/hour, steps taken/day, test questions/100, money earned/field’s average salary. We got quarterly reviews, job evaluations, and tested certifications."
I've a dilemma:
I've come to believe that this really is a bad thing, not just because we're suboptimizing output at the expense of quality of life, but also because you get what you measure: you can totally get more LOC/day without actually getting anything useful.
BUT, what's the alternative? People need to be rewarded for output; different individuals' outputs are different; still, should we reward them the same? Or should we make it dependent on output (therefore, reward merit, not need)? If so, should the measure be subjective or objective? Can you make it objective without turning it into what the author is talking about? Can you make it subjective while keeping it fair? No matter how much I try, when I try to be fair in rewards/compensation, I find metrics raising their ugly head.
Just remove the individual metric. We know they don't work.
Incentivize the entire company for the success of the company. Pay people fairly in an uncomplicated way. Align all the incentives and don't reward anything that is not directly connected to the clear and well-communicated success of the company.
So even if I do the bare minimum at work, I should be rewarded the same as someone who worked his pants off? Sure, that's fine. Just one thing, that guy who was working his pants off no longer has the incentive to work hard because his reward is tied to how the company as a whole does. He will begin to do the bare minimum, and the company suffers.
He will eventually become jaded with this and leave to some place that will recognise and reward his extra output.
It turns out what you say is not true in reality, but it persists as the myth of individualism in the corporate workforce. It is simply false; it doesn't happen.
When you align the incentives, uncomplicate rewards, clearly guide people in the same direction toward clear and logical goals, and enable them to do good work they can be proud of, all of that individual infighting and politics goes away.
You can still compensate people fairly for their contributions as measured simply and clearly as "contribution to the success of the company," there's absolutely no reason not to; you just remove the complex measurement and competition that results in the opposite of the desired goal. Simplify.
This is well-understood stuff. It is not new. It resulted quite directly in the success of the Japanese economy after WWII, driven by the teachings of statistician W. Edwards Deming.
We, as Americans, ignore it because of the persistence of myths like the one you mention. Because of our fixation on individual gain and protection, and on a pervasive belief in the incompetence and dishonesty of our fellow man. We fail to see the truth: that the failures around us are a result not of poor individuals, but of systems which surround them and stop anyone except a few unicorns from being able to be effective.
The article states that Karoshi is death by productivity. This is generally not correct. Karoshi is death from over-work.
The distinction concerns quantity of output. Many Japanese will work long hours with little impact on output. Such people are therefore hard-working yet unproductive.
Japanese business culture tends to respect effort more than result.
What really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in Taylorism's perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had. In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines. In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed.
Ouch.
We are productive without price. Not because people aren't dying, they surely are, uncounted lives and families are smothered with despair. There is no price because there's no measure to quantify what we are losing.
This makes me wonder how history will look on our mental health issues, as we look back on alcoholism in early 20th century America.
For those sympathetic to the views of the article, I can't recommend enough Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft for a fuller and prescriptive discussion of the history and philosophy of these issues of work and meaning and mental health.
Increased Pareto is a better thing to aim for than increased productivity.
Doing the one very important thing, the one thing with huge returns or leverage will outweigh all the other probably also important things that really hard working and productive people can do in a day
It however takes wisdom to know what is important and courage to trust your wisdom.
Why am I productive? No other reason than I dislike boredom. I had the unusual situation growing up of having completely free summers (including college). To do absolutely and whatever I wanted. Well, long story short, I basically wasted them and didn't get anything accomplished. And I definitely wasn't happy with that much useless free time.
So now I do things because I find them interesting. I "measure myself" and try to improve at things because it's a fun game for me. The results don't really matter in the end, but it keeps me entertained.
America is also the country that gave us 'stick it to the man', 'tune in, turn on, drop out', 'make love, not war'. America is a big country, big enough to find a space somewhere to l9ive your life almost any way you like and pobably find others who want to do the same too. In fact I'm hard pressed for think of any other nation on the entire planet that is more diverse. Anyone care to name one?
I speak as an outsider (a Brit) that's visited the US several times and has many friends and acquaintances there.
Trying to summarize the post: Free time can increase your wisdom and is necessary sometimes for higher order thinking. Too much productivity, that is not having time for your mind wandering, produces a bad effect in society. To compose that post has taken the author four months.
I think that every great writer has been many times in his life waiting for inspiration. But inspiration only occurs when you are inviting inspiration to come by working a lot, your mind has to be struggling with the problem, at least in a subconscious level, and then, suddenly, inspiration comes to your rescue.
If you liked the theme of this essay you will like this book:
"How to Be Idle" by Tom Hodgkinson.
The book starts similarly and expands the idea of idleness to trying to bring it into your life.
I may somewhat agree with the author's case against productivity, but I think it's important not to confuse it with a case against production. At the end of the day (or life) I think you do want to look back and think of what you've produced (rather than consumed), and how you did it. Was it fun? Satisfying?
I think it's fair to want to rebel against production/time. It's not bad to think instead of something along the lines of satisfaction/production.
This is the major problem when you do things for reasons other then you love to do it. Stop trying to do whats "hip" and find your passion. A lot of the thoughts given in the article have the slight taste of the author wanting to do them because they are intellectual/trendy/response from society. Do what you love, simple as.
> Stop trying to do whats "hip" and find your passion.
Don't. Don't go overboard with the passion thing. If your passion is origami, you are in for a very rough ride trying to live off selling folded paper on the street.
Find a balance. What's difficult is that life is not black and white, it's in shades of grey. Find something that the market needs and that you like doing. Not something that you absolutely love doing and that nobody ever wants, nor something that the market absolutely wants and that you loathe doing.
You wrote about the time when you weren't beating yourself for not being productive enough and you described that past experience in a way that seemed to me like you were happy. What made you want to become productive? What did you imagine 'productive' looks and feels like? Could you track down your most internal motives?
Okay we should spend more time wasting more time. But how to pay your bills in that time? As long as this question is not answered all this discussion is meaningless in my eyes.
Maybe I misunderstood the article? I understand that he wants to go to other countries, walk around, watch the rain and think about life in general. Maybe you can do that if you are a museum security guard, but in most jobs that's not possible. And at least I am quite tired after working 40 hours plus taking care of the basics needs I have (buying grocieries, cooking, cleaning) and my family has (spending time together, solving problems of other family members). I'm quite happy if I can manage to squeeze in 7 to 8 hours of sleep.
This is an excellent post because it focuses on a central topic: mankind's behavioral predispositions.
The world today runs on profit and productivity. Morals, ethics and philosophies are irrelevant hindrances, as SV and Wall St. have demonstrated repeatedly. This is all well and good, as the last century apparently demonstrated that all ideologies and philosophies are the devil incarnate (Nazism, Leninism, Maoism, etc.)
But I do wonder one thing...did we quit on ideology prematurely? An ideology which I've always held as my own mission in life is the relentless pursuit of knowledge through science.
Throughout history, there have been times where mankind has focused intently on this goal, and the results were incredible. Sadly, most of these periods were spurred on by major wars.
What I really want to know is this:
Is it possible to built a society whose goal is the advancement of mankind's knowledge?
The profit motive and the free market are undoubtedly the best motivators for mankind, due to our evolutionary predispositions for survival and inherent need to establish status hierarchies. But could we not harness these energies, and direct them to positive-sum endavors such as science and engineering research, rather than a pure profit-driven battle to the death?
Keep in mind, the historical mean society throughout history has been oligarchy. It appears the last century was a brief respite due to massive wars and resultant existential threats. We now seem to be heading right back into the oligarchical paradigm of rich get richer, and poor stay serfs [1].
I can envision a society built around the pursuit of knowledge. The market exists and is regulated to produce needs and wants efficiently, yet without negative-sum behavior (regulatory capture, corruption, anti-competitive conduct, wage fixing, etc.) Education and research are a prime government mandate in addition to infrastructure, defense, healthcare and a social safety net. Citizens are incentivized to hone their skills and education continuously without massive financial downsides (student debt). State sponsored research institutes exist throughout the country similar to Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, JPL, etc. and serve to stimulate the economy through constant research projects, both large and small. The projects provide jobs for low and high skilled individuals (e.g. ITER, LHC). Those who enjoy pure research have a plethora of opportunities to move the state of the art forward. Those who don't, have excellent and rewarding employment.
The challenge in creating this society is a very tough one: humans are not motivated by knowledge. We are motivated by status, sex, and power, though few ever understand it or admit to it. But I hope that one day, knowledge of our inherent weaknesses will become common enough such that we can fight our destructive natures in an effort to transcend our limitations.
>>But I do wonder one thing...did we quit on ideology prematurely?
In reality we quit on the idea that society can be engineered, but we nevertheless retain the notation that individual actors can be engineered. For example, we reject the notation that the communist party can build a stable society but we retain social value that you shouldn't judge people solely on wealth.
>>I can envision a society built around the pursuit of knowledge.
Its hard to say what is and isn't knowledge, I shudder to think of a society based on research publications.
This goes back to my first point. Its very hard to engineer a society. We can only hope to make reasonable actors.
This may be far wiser than almost anything that has ever been posted on HN, but you can't feed this shit to people who are not ready for it. It is a lesson which can not be taught. The real truths in life are not something you can read about. Real knowledge can only ever come from within. You can never lead someone to knowledge, but you CAN inspire them to seek their own - and you've done a pretty good job at that. Thank you.
For sure. I'm thankful that my children and students will not have to spend my decade in the lab. If I manage to tell them in a way that they can hear.
Besides tax contribution topping, and market protection (what's this siphon to p-shares that trade in microseconds doubling my concern's trade overhead, and where is it rubbing the walls;) and citizenship (why is there a regulatory forbidden level where we may want our customers;) it's hard to say there is a forum; and that you don't rent there. Pretty sure I missed it.
805 million people on earth don't have enough to eat. 783 million don't have access to clean water. 1.9 million die of diarrhea every year. 176 million African adults can't read.
And this guy sits around the first world for a couple years with the back of his hand nailed to his forehead.
If he can't bring himself to do more than write a couple essays and snap some photos over a couple years, I would suggest a refreshing visit to Mozambique or Syria. People there could surely use help with the basic necessities of life.
How much productive effort goes into solving these problems versus other less necessary problems?
Let me define productivity: conscious effort to re-organize the world's energy and matter.
Am I honour bound to re-organize the world's energy and matter until it's in the ideal state (which of course is never obtainable and not even definable, since it's different for each person)?
The author has an issue with productivity for the sake of productivity. Spending time helping people in need is obviously a valuable and wise use of time, but you shouldn't feel guilty for not spending every waking moment increasing your net worth.
<i>The author has an issue with productivity for the sake of productivity.</i>
I agree with that sentiment.
<i>Spending time helping people in need is obviously a valuable and wise use of time, but you shouldn't feel guilty for not spending every waking moment increasing your net worth.</i>
Again, I agree, but the author seems to be A-OK with goofing off for years instead of pitching in with the rest of us.
I wasn't reading that in the first few paragraphs, what I read was the author has a huge feeling of guilt for not being productive enough, moving abroad in a rather random attempt at being more productive - whatever that means. It ended up being goofing off for a couple years, probably because she didn't have to make any money or didn't have much expenses down there - and probably realizing that pushing yourself to be more productive will actually lead to procrastination, and feeling guilty about not being productive is self-destructive and futile.
In a complex system, productivity is often paradoxical. One realization or idea at the fringes of the random walk of progress can be worth the work of hundreds of millions of people on the known status quo. We need people exploring on the outskirts of reality and knowledge and life as much as we need the workers, and the people who do that are invariably the ones with a connection to their humanity and the humanity of others, like this person.
Your suggestion is sound: see the real world. Sure. But don't disparage humanism and ideation and self-discovery. It is truly our only hope.
This is bullshit. Just continue to work 16 hours a day, increase your productivity and your startup will succeed. After that you'll be happy forever. And your investor too.
I believe in similar things. Here, where I currently live, we spend so much time working and being productive that we forget to ask questions. "Why am I doing this?" "What is the meaning of it?" "What is really important?" Then we end up lost, depressed and what not. Not all of us do, but some? Certainly. We do it because others do it. Because we believe that pursuing a different venue is not realistic. Others have that? Hell, I should have it too.
"I should totally run a startup."
Anyways, it happened to me. Went to SEA for four months. Dreamed. Life is amazing. I can do whatever I want. I don't need money to live. yadi. yada. Then you come back, and no one understands you. You are a hippy. I'm not.
In periods of doubt, I write things down. Then I remember what I believe. Then I remember I'm going back soon. That it is what I should be doing.
Being productive is ok. It's fun. But, in the end, it's not important. People are. At least, that's the conclusion I came to.
I guess I'm just rambling. Carry on.
Note: when I write "We", I mostly mean "I".