Well, programming isn't really traditional work. You know, W=F×s We don't apply a lot of F and definitely don't move a long s, so at the end of the day ther

Well, programming isn't really traditional work. You know, W=F×s We don't apply a lot of F and definitely don't move a long s, so at the end of the day there isn't a lot of W we've done. I think it's useful to think of the Puritanian work ethic briefly mentioned in this article, together with the recent article about running modern society on human power alone. Back in the day, we really did run a lot of things on human power. Yes, for the really long s, we used large animals capable of sustaining a great deal of F throughout the day, but other than that, a lot of stuff was done by hand. If you don't apply your share of the F, you literally don't have food to eat. The goods you had were a direct product of hand labour, every bread was made with a nontrivial amount of calories expended by human muscle. As we see, the more you work your muscles, the better they start working - that's the basic premise of exercise and getting in shape. However, your brain doesn't quite work like that. You can over-exert your mind much more easily than you can your muscles and it just doesn't recover as well as them. For your muscle, the cycle is work->muscle hurts->muscle recovers->work hurts you less now. For your mind, the cycle is the other way around work->you get burned out->you recover->you now burn out more easily. This fundamental difference in the nature of work in the knowledge economy is what we should focus on, to overcome the work ethic, traditions and employer-employee regulations, that were formed in the time when 1 bread = lots and lots of calories expended by muscle.