11 ms·

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable

227 points by gotocake 8y ago

mc32 8y ago
When Kaynes madd these predictions the world pop wa about 2 billion. With that pop it may be possible to achieve a 1940x level of leisure for everyone. But at 7 billion I’m pessimistic and think it’s unfair to anchor the article on something envisioned 80 years ago. I’d like to know what the author expects people to do with their free time? Get immersed in social media/games ? Get involved in hobbies? Lifelong learning? Consumerism/travel? Just what exactly?
- fulafel 8y ago
  Why would population change the picture?
  - mc32 8y ago
    Impact on limited resources and impact on the environment.
    - kristianc 8y ago
      That assumes that technological progress is static, which it patently is not. We are now able to make more out of the limited resources we have.
      - samsonradu 8y ago
        I believe being able to make more out of the resources does not necessarily translate into actually making more. There are arguments that building infrastructure today is slower than 30 years ago due to regulations/political constraints, despite the technological progress.
        sgt101 8y ago
        I think we surface more of the consequences of infrastructure construction in terms of health and safety and pollution, which appears to be slower, but in fact means much more is done.
      - AdrianB1 8y ago
        Technological progress cannot create more land; housing in more expensive due to lack of land in many places, limited size of woods makes wood furniture more and more expensive, farming becomes more and more intensive. In the time of my grandfathers finding a place to build a house was very simple (and cheap) and there was more than enough wood to make everything out of the best quality wood. Even heating in the winter was done on wood as it was plenty for everyone. But population quadrupled since, the land and wood per capita is a quarter and decreasing.
        Hoasi 8y ago
        > Technological progress cannot create more land The Netherlands did reclaim land from the sea.
        AdrianB1 8y ago
        That is trolling; the land that can be claimed from the sea is irrelevant on a global scale, especially into the landlocked countries.
      - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        > more out of the limited resources we have Compared to 10 years ago? Maybe. Compared to... 200 years ago? Absolutely not.
  - downrightmike 8y ago
    If we are talking about modern people only working 2 days a week and still being as productive as people were in the past while working a whole week, then you have to see that 3.5 times the population increases the number of people able to do work. So either the work is divided among more people and people work even less and are able to live, or the bosses keep all the cash and make people work a full week and give them a marginal percent of what they brought in and everyone is worse off.
    - fulafel 8y ago
      I think you are close to falling into the "lump of labour" fallacy. Work is generally done to service consumer demand that scales with the number of people.
- empath75 8y ago
  Have you ever been to a place where people don’t work all the time? They spend time with their family and relax.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  All of your suggestions are excellent alternatives to unfulfilling or unnecessary work. (EDIT: Except the consumerism part, but travel 100% solid suggestion)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sgt101 8y ago
  You are not working to support and salve 7bn needy fellows, you are slaving for the consumerist benefit of about 7m plutocrats.
- bitL 8y ago
  There is a cluster of super important hard jobs requiring a lot of hours nobody wants to do, that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Then there is a cluster of BS jobs where 2 hours a week is already too much and any additional hour just adds to a damage it causes on company/society. Then there is a misleading average of these two clusters and more regular jobs in-between.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > social media/games ... hobbies ... Lifelong learning ... Consumerism/travel It's really saddening that people bought into the false dichotomy of work VS leisure. Lifelong endeavors in science, art, activism, politics exist[ed] outside of what we call "work". Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless others are/were doing something that is not "work" and certainly not a "hobby". Call it a purpose or a mission. Serious volunteering and activism doesn't require you to be a genius tho. There is plenty of needs that are not addressed in this world.
  - mc32 8y ago
    The thing is that aspect takes care of what, 1, 5, 10%? What do the rest do? What is there to be activist about once you’ve achieved a 15hr workweek globally?
    - lapnitnelav 8y ago
      What's wrong with doing nothing, laying on the couch snuggling your pets / SO / family, or enjoying your friend's company around a meal / drinks?
    - egypturnash 8y ago
      Off the top of my head: Racial equality Gender equality Rebalancing society so it’s not based on constant overconsumption Trying to reverse the results of a couple hundred years of treating the world as raw materials for industrial profit (global warming, anthropocene era mass extinction event, pacific garbage gyre, etc) AI rights maybe? Fighting people/organizations attempting to pull society back to the current levels of inequity Plus a bunch of things I am too immersed in the current situation to even imagine. Like nobody even had the concepts for “trans rights” when I was a kid but now that gay marriage is basically a done deal there’s room to fight for that.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Anything that they feel makes them happy? I mean, eight hour workdays are an arbitrary invention, just based on the fact that the old "eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of sleep" slogan made for a nice Schelling point. And people mostly didn't expect us to get stuck there like we did. During the industrial revolution, leisure mostly did not exist for the new working class. (On the other hand historically the aristocracy enjoyed a life of pure leisure.) I guess in the 1800s there were some people asking "but what would you do with all that time if you weren't working at a factory 14 hours a day six days a week". The question was as silly then as it is now. Out of all arguments for having to work n hours a day, "but otherwise you'd have too much time" must be the worst.
  - watwut 8y ago
    It was not completely random. There were experiments with working hours. Those 14 hours days are innefective as shown in pretty much all studies on the topic. They also were related to quite a lot of social and societal problems.
- sershe 8y ago
  Well, if all else fails they are free to create mock companies that have 7 layers of management, office politics, a commute, and free coffee; then spend 8 hours a day engaging with them.
baxtr 8y ago
It’s funny how relative this is. My American friends tell me: we work, you Germans live. My Italian friends say: we live, you Germans work.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Who has it better than the Italians? Maybe Greeks. Or the obscenely rich :)
  - erokar 8y ago
    Greeks work long hours, but productivity is low.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      I think before austerity measure were put in place (which I don't support at all btw), Greeks retired in their 50s and had lots of vacation, no? Is productivity low in gross Euro terms? The Greek cost of living is certainly cheaper than most countries, but a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread anywhere you go.
  - zerogvt 8y ago
    A bit of fact-checking would be nice before adding to false stereotypes https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS Use the arrows to sort for any year. Then check the ordered list.
- zoul 8y ago
  I’m from the Czech Republic and the tempo here is about the same as in Germany. When we have recently been to Taiwan, I felt like an utter slacker compared to the work/life balance there. It’s really an eye-opening experience, knowing that there are much more extreme approaches in both ways that are considered normal.
- yoodenvranx 8y ago
  I heard it slightly different: French people work to live and German people live to work.
downrightmike 8y ago
There is also a meta to this. He is telling people in the past that their children will not have to work as long/hard. In doing this he gives people a dream to think about while they slog away in their own work. It is an escapism fantasy. I've worked at places where they lay people off, half of the group and the other half has to pick up the pieces. a few months later when it gets really bad and people are burning out, a Senior VP comes in to "listen" to people and put up a front that the company cares and tries to sell the employees on the idea that it will get better and that the company only want to keep people occupied 73% of the time. Their numbers I don't know how they came up with that 73%, but people ate it up and still got burned out, all the while talking about how things will get better and somehow that 73% will happen. It never did.
- hitekker 8y ago
  I believe Yuval Harari in Sapiens once said all social movements start by saying "the world, as it is, is unnatural. At some point, we were moving in the right direction but then we took a detour. We need to get back on track for the world to be natural again." You are correct that the sentiment of "things will get better, as long as we follow the way" is an empty appeal to the future. But "things use to be better, we've lost our way", that the systems around is are unnatural and therefore wrong, is a powerful drive for a complacent society. A catalyst for social change. As the oft-repeated 1984 quote goes, "Control the present, control the past. Control the past, control the future."
  - roymurdock 8y ago
    natural has a completely different definition for different groups of people. was it “natural” for european settlers in America to have slaves up until the 18th century? was it “natural” for native Americans to live communally and without the ideas of property rights and ownership brought over by the Europeans? natural is such a vague and loaded term that its nearly meaningless when applied to “us” as human beings the real key is labor productivity. unless we invent new machines that make us more productive, and re jump start the demand for skilled human labor as we saw during the various industrialization periods of the last 120 years, then we will continue down a path where humans are less and less valued as their skills atrophy and they can be replaced by automated systems or more often cheaper labor doing a decent job at a much lower rate
erokar 8y ago
In reality we all work too much. 8 hours a day is extreme, we should strive for 2-4 hours.
- sombremesa 8y ago
  I used to work at Amazon, which is known for its draconian policies, but I was on a good team at one point. On that team, you were expected to allot no more than 4 hours a day to your tickets. The rest of the time was for meetings, code reviews, self organization, administrative tasks, 20% time, etc. Now that I'm in a company where everyone is always heads down and code reviews clog up the pipeline and no one is on the same page, I'm beginning to see that being less "productive" gets more done.
  - gubbrora 8y ago
    Slow code review is really bad for productivity. Both cost of task switching as you wait, and of merging upstream changes into your branch.
  - dwiel 8y ago
    That's a reasonable observation, but only loosely related to the parent post. Admin, code reviews, meetings all count towards that 2-4 hour goal
  - nine_k 8y ago
    Being productive is getting things out the door to production. Writing code is only a part of this equation. If you don't have a process that cares well about the other required things (reviews, testing, meeting and thinking, etc), you end up with a lot of code written, and much less of it useful for business at a given moment.
  - awshepard 8y ago
    "The Phoenix Project" references this - when a particular resource (expert) is the only person who can get some task done. Of course that means that person is at or beyond 100% utilization, which means their queue length (or wait time) goes through the roof. Paradoxically, reducing utilization increases productivity/throughput. The section about controlling WIP here [1] illustrates it quite well. [1] https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanbans-part-2/ https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-proj...
unclebucknasty 8y ago
Just yesterday, I was watching an episode of "This Week in Startups" [0]. At about 12:20, the conversation turns to jobs, UBI, etc. and his guest, Rabios, starts going on about how depressed people would be without jobs, with statements like this: >"The by-product of your toil is what makes you human in many ways, and if you pay people not to work, you're actually destroying their self-worth." My first thought was "well, that's convenient, coming from a guy who makes his living from the work of others". But, of course, it's also likely that he and the "investor-class"--as well as a broad segment of people, including much of startup culture--really are so disconnected from reality, that they can't fathom that not everyone is in a position to "create", "find fulfillment", or otherwise change the world through their labor. But, do they not notice when they see people cleaning toilets, etc? Or is it just those people's moral failing? Calacanis then goes on to make the case that young men become despondent and start riots, turn to terrorism, etc because they are unemployed. This, as if their despondency in unemployment has everything to do with not having access to work as the sole means of fulfillment; and nothing to do with the fact that we've structured society in such a way that we cannot subsist at any level of decency, except through our labor. I think these people have convinced themselves of the inherent truth of workism, because it serves them and because it is their experience. But, with this increasing disconnect and the mounting pressures faced by workers, the situation will ultimately be untenable. [0] https://youtu.be/fOS9K4UU50A https://youtu.be/fOS9K4UU50A
- jblow 8y ago
  Was there ever a time when a human being could subsist at any level of decency except through labor? Why then would you expect humans to be adapted to such a situation?
  - daniel-cussen 8y ago
    Hunting. Gathering. You have to do things, but it's not labor. Tribes cared for their sick and old, and they would watch the children. For what you said to be true, even chewing food would have to be considered labor.
    - 8y ago
mortenjorck 8y ago
This is a fine discussion of the culture of workism, but it’s not complete without a discussion of the economics. Keynes' prediction of shorter work weeks would have been much closer to the mark if the gains in productivity in the latter part of the century had been reflected in commensurately higher per-hour compensation.
Animats 8y ago
Not a new idea. See "Stakhanovite_movement".[1] Capitalism does it better than Communism did, by pushing competitiveness down to the individual. The destruction of unions made this possible. It's so much more cost effective than slavery. Slavery doesn't provide a just in time workforce. Slaves are a capital expense and an ongoing operating cost. Capitalist workers are disposable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
coldtea 8y ago
It also makes them poor. Not only because the most valuable resource is time (and they are not getting those extra work time back, at least not while they're as young to enjoy them), but also because if companies depend on the marginal benefits of working more hours, then the workplace is a race to the bottom.
jl2718 8y ago
For the American Natives, when the landscape was lush and the population was low, almost all time was spent in leisure. Then settlers came and made farms which were massively more productive, but they had to work a lot more because they were feeding a city of people doing other things. In the city, people can’t farm, so they have to buy food and shelter by inventing goods and services to trade for it which previously had no value. Then in these markets too, productivity increases so that a small number of people are working very hard to provide a low-value product to a large number of people. As productivity increases, so must scale, and workers are displaced, who must then find a way to sustain themselves by creating a new product that is even less necessary to survival and well-being. This basic economic cycle is immutable regardless of the political system or label you place on it, and I believe that Keynes was a charlatan to deny it. A time traveler from the past might assume that we are all in some kind of penal colony being forced to do absolutely nothing and stressed out about random punishments for meaningless transgressions. There is one thing that breaks the cycle: population decline. It was the plague that broke the pointless misery of the feudal system. In our world, even voluntary population decline is considered such a crisis that leaders are eager to sacrifice all forms of sustainability for any kind of growth. Unwise.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Wow. It's almost like humans are governed by the same rules as algae blooms and predator-prey systems, where unsustainable growth causes total collapse on a timescale somewhat longer than any individual's life.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    We are and we aren’t. Both the society and the social creature are co-evolving so the carrying capacity land has for a human can change dramatically due to culture. Of course there is a minimum caloric basis but the world can produce much more than subsistence calories for 10 billion people and has for a long time. Just in terms of murder and calories we are actually no longer constrained by predator/prey. For now.
    - 8y ago
acd 8y ago
I think America would be better if you had 5-6 weeks of vacation and/or 4 days workweek and a year of parental. Then you would have better work life balance and be happier in general!
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Especially a minimum amount of vacation time would also be market friendly because everybody could compete on the same level.
DiseasedBadger 8y ago
"Not getting paidism" is killing Americans. Does anyone remember houses? Honestly I barely remember living in a house. I probably never will again.
- sircastor 8y ago
  This exposes to me how privileged I really am. I have lived almost exclusively in houses my whole life. There are exceptions like college, but for the most part I've enjoyed a detached house on suburbia.
  - meddlepal 8y ago
    Meh, most people can afford a house somewhere in the US. I have a friend that does gas station convenience store attendant level work and owns a house in Iowa. It isn't much but it has a yard, was in decent shape at purchase and only cost him about 100K. What most people mean when they say they can't afford a house is they can't afford a house in or near Boston, NYC, Seattle, SF, DC or some other hot and important urban market. That's an entitlement problem not an affordability problem. People feel entitled to live in certain locations.
    - mav3rick 8y ago
      I'd go with people "aspire" to live near a good mix of culture and opportunities. That's why these places are expensive.
    - mnm1 8y ago
      It's so entitled that all these people want to live in places that have jobs. How unbelievably elitist they are to want to work for a living. /s
      - hellisothers 8y ago
        Living in an area and owning a house are not the same thing. I 100% understand the desire and angst/emotion but don’t get the entitlement, that one deserves this, it can never work out for everybody. Living in SF area I want to understand this point of view, plz point me at a good articulation.
spynxic 8y ago
It's interesting to see the range of perspectives on work put forth in this thread. I'd only point out how strange it is that the question of what is being worked towards isn't more often in these discussions. I can only imagine that is because there is predominate perception of individuals as competitors rather than allies. Unfortunately such a perception keeps the masses grasping for their share rather than promoting a common drive towards abundance.
huffmsa 8y ago
> In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. Surprise, a 70% marginal tax rate makes people reluctant to work when making dollars at that rate.
paulryanrogers 8y ago
> But everybody worships something. Bullshit. This meme needs to die. People may desire meaning in their lives, but that's generally a sign they have ascended higher on Maslow's pyramid. And finding meaning in certain kinds of work is still considered noble: education, small scale agriculture, charity, etc. Perhaps other industries could be equally fulfilling if workers gained a larger share of the spoils of their labor.
- jm__87 8y ago
  This statement is actually what stood out the most to me because I disagree with it. But, I actually disagree with you that people at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid don't need meaning. If anything, these people need meaning in their lives far more than the people at the top of the pyramid - otherwise, how does one justify all the suffering they must go through on a day to day basis. If you're struggling to make ends meet, having some meaning in your life such as children to raise and feed will make the struggle feel justified. You're not just working those long hours for low pay so you can go home and eat, sleep and repeat, you're doing it for your family and hopefully your children will have a better future as a result of your hard work.
Mr_Shiba 8y ago
Curious, I just red "It doesn't have to be crazy at work" by David Heinemeier Hansson. Could not be more true, we have created a toxic amoral culture that is making everyone miserable. This work thing, the whole point is to make our life better, not worse.
craftinator 8y ago
No shit. Our government has engineered a culture of fear to coerce the average person to work themselves as hard as they can, increasing the governments power and posh lifestyles for its elite, president, congresspeople, senior officials etc...
mnm1 8y ago
This workism sounds exactly like the puritanical ideological bullshit that's been going around in America for hundreds of years fueling all types of hideous cultural practices like the current obsession with work and productivity. This is clearly a culture pushed by the business owners who undoubtedly would be happy to have slavery back if it applied to everyone but themselves. It's sick, disgusting, and oppressive. It's the sign of a seriously broken culture and society that no longer meets the needs of workers but only of their masters. I don't know how you fix this at the societal level because such stupid ideology has been around for so long, but at the individual level it's possible. Individuals can start to recognize and see through the bullshit of this ideology. Some will even be able to disconnect further from work and focus on what they value rather than what their masters value. The more disconnected, the more disengaged, and the less work people put in for their overlords, the happier they will be. One promising avenue is remote work. In a remote setting it's much easier to reject this stupidity and just focus on doing a reasonable amount of work, then moving on to non work stuff. Some management of appearances is necessary, of course, as the corporate overlords would be unhappy if they found out their employees were not 100% invested even if they did all the work asked on time with great quality. This is one of the worst aspects of American culture. It's almost like the slavery mindset never died. Instead, the new wage slaves have taken the mindset and co-opted it for their own identities. If I had to guess why, it'd probably be because our society does not provide much else for most people. Money is such a focus, most people never think of anything else, even when they have plenty of money. Or perhaps in a society where any little accident can bankrupt a person and send them to skid row homeless, there's no such thing as enough money and people are too scared to do anything but work and earn money. I know this last thing keeps me up at night, and I have to consciously remind myself that there is more to life than preparing for disaster.
- samhain 8y ago
  For me, I will not have children. I would never subject another human to this kind of life.
  - QualityReboot 8y ago
    Same. I don't want to birth a human into a life of slavery. If I secure enough wealth that I don't have to work, and my children wouldn't have to work, only then would I have kids.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
swayvil 8y ago
If I was a capitalistic billionaire, "Workism" is a religion that I would definitely encourage in my serfs.
maerF0x0 8y ago
> There is new enthusiasm for universal policies—like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized child care, and a child allowance—which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These universal policies will only exacerbate the load on those who work. Remember that when ever the government spends money on "someone" that money comes from someone who had to work to produce it. Universal income that dismantles the bureaucracy and keeps the budget status quo could be a better system, but one that increases the budget will just put more labor on the shoulders of those who work.
rajacombinator 8y ago
Keep in mind this is a result of great powers applying simultaneous asset inflation and wage suppression to destroy this country.
Sortofeven8811 8y ago
47 1/2 years as a wage slave, by choice, and never heard of such non sense. I have known co-workers over time who may believe this theory. I treated time off, every minute, as a mini vacation be it weekends, paid holidays, paid vacation, paid sick leave and time off during labor strikes during which I would work part time to keep fiscally healthy. How time off is managed is key. If the job has no 'percs', sickness will result.
strikelaserclaw 8y ago
I would say those things that gave most Americans a sense of identity like community, religion or whatever are completely eroding. People move away to colleges, move away for jobs, i think we live in an era where the world looks so vast and chaotic, so people look for meaning in things they feel that are in their control, their work.

227 points by gotocake 8y ago

mc32 8y ago

When Kaynes madd these predictions the world pop wa about 2 billion. With that pop it may be possible to achieve a 1940x level of leisure for everyone. But at 7 billion I’m pessimistic and think it’s unfair to anchor the article on something envisioned 80 years ago. I’d like to know what the author expects people to do with their free time? Get immersed in social media/games ? Get involved in hobbies? Lifelong learning? Consumerism/travel? Just what exactly?

fulafel 8y ago
Why would population change the picture?
- mc32 8y ago
  Impact on limited resources and impact on the environment.
  - kristianc 8y ago
    That assumes that technological progress is static, which it patently is not. We are now able to make more out of the limited resources we have.
    - samsonradu 8y ago
      I believe being able to make more out of the resources does not necessarily translate into actually making more. There are arguments that building infrastructure today is slower than 30 years ago due to regulations/political constraints, despite the technological progress.
      - sgt101 8y ago
        I think we surface more of the consequences of infrastructure construction in terms of health and safety and pollution, which appears to be slower, but in fact means much more is done.
    - AdrianB1 8y ago
      Technological progress cannot create more land; housing in more expensive due to lack of land in many places, limited size of woods makes wood furniture more and more expensive, farming becomes more and more intensive. In the time of my grandfathers finding a place to build a house was very simple (and cheap) and there was more than enough wood to make everything out of the best quality wood. Even heating in the winter was done on wood as it was plenty for everyone. But population quadrupled since, the land and wood per capita is a quarter and decreasing.
      - Hoasi 8y ago
        > Technological progress cannot create more land The Netherlands did reclaim land from the sea.
        AdrianB1 8y ago
        That is trolling; the land that can be claimed from the sea is irrelevant on a global scale, especially into the landlocked countries.
    - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
      > more out of the limited resources we have Compared to 10 years ago? Maybe. Compared to... 200 years ago? Absolutely not.
- downrightmike 8y ago
  If we are talking about modern people only working 2 days a week and still being as productive as people were in the past while working a whole week, then you have to see that 3.5 times the population increases the number of people able to do work. So either the work is divided among more people and people work even less and are able to live, or the bosses keep all the cash and make people work a full week and give them a marginal percent of what they brought in and everyone is worse off.
  - fulafel 8y ago
    I think you are close to falling into the "lump of labour" fallacy. Work is generally done to service consumer demand that scales with the number of people.
empath75 8y ago
Have you ever been to a place where people don’t work all the time? They spend time with their family and relax.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
All of your suggestions are excellent alternatives to unfulfilling or unnecessary work. (EDIT: Except the consumerism part, but travel 100% solid suggestion)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sgt101 8y ago
You are not working to support and salve 7bn needy fellows, you are slaving for the consumerist benefit of about 7m plutocrats.
bitL 8y ago
There is a cluster of super important hard jobs requiring a lot of hours nobody wants to do, that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Then there is a cluster of BS jobs where 2 hours a week is already too much and any additional hour just adds to a damage it causes on company/society. Then there is a misleading average of these two clusters and more regular jobs in-between.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> social media/games ... hobbies ... Lifelong learning ... Consumerism/travel It's really saddening that people bought into the false dichotomy of work VS leisure. Lifelong endeavors in science, art, activism, politics exist[ed] outside of what we call "work". Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless others are/were doing something that is not "work" and certainly not a "hobby". Call it a purpose or a mission. Serious volunteering and activism doesn't require you to be a genius tho. There is plenty of needs that are not addressed in this world.
- mc32 8y ago
  The thing is that aspect takes care of what, 1, 5, 10%? What do the rest do? What is there to be activist about once you’ve achieved a 15hr workweek globally?
  - lapnitnelav 8y ago
    What's wrong with doing nothing, laying on the couch snuggling your pets / SO / family, or enjoying your friend's company around a meal / drinks?
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    Off the top of my head: Racial equality Gender equality Rebalancing society so it’s not based on constant overconsumption Trying to reverse the results of a couple hundred years of treating the world as raw materials for industrial profit (global warming, anthropocene era mass extinction event, pacific garbage gyre, etc) AI rights maybe? Fighting people/organizations attempting to pull society back to the current levels of inequity Plus a bunch of things I am too immersed in the current situation to even imagine. Like nobody even had the concepts for “trans rights” when I was a kid but now that gay marriage is basically a done deal there’s room to fight for that.
Sharlin 8y ago
Anything that they feel makes them happy? I mean, eight hour workdays are an arbitrary invention, just based on the fact that the old "eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of sleep" slogan made for a nice Schelling point. And people mostly didn't expect us to get stuck there like we did. During the industrial revolution, leisure mostly did not exist for the new working class. (On the other hand historically the aristocracy enjoyed a life of pure leisure.) I guess in the 1800s there were some people asking "but what would you do with all that time if you weren't working at a factory 14 hours a day six days a week". The question was as silly then as it is now. Out of all arguments for having to work n hours a day, "but otherwise you'd have too much time" must be the worst.
- watwut 8y ago
  It was not completely random. There were experiments with working hours. Those 14 hours days are innefective as shown in pretty much all studies on the topic. They also were related to quite a lot of social and societal problems.
sershe 8y ago
Well, if all else fails they are free to create mock companies that have 7 layers of management, office politics, a commute, and free coffee; then spend 8 hours a day engaging with them.

baxtr 8y ago

It’s funny how relative this is. My American friends tell me: we work, you Germans live. My Italian friends say: we live, you Germans work.

anoncoward111 8y ago
Who has it better than the Italians? Maybe Greeks. Or the obscenely rich :)
- erokar 8y ago
  Greeks work long hours, but productivity is low.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    I think before austerity measure were put in place (which I don't support at all btw), Greeks retired in their 50s and had lots of vacation, no? Is productivity low in gross Euro terms? The Greek cost of living is certainly cheaper than most countries, but a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread anywhere you go.
- zerogvt 8y ago
  A bit of fact-checking would be nice before adding to false stereotypes https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS Use the arrows to sort for any year. Then check the ordered list.
zoul 8y ago
I’m from the Czech Republic and the tempo here is about the same as in Germany. When we have recently been to Taiwan, I felt like an utter slacker compared to the work/life balance there. It’s really an eye-opening experience, knowing that there are much more extreme approaches in both ways that are considered normal.
yoodenvranx 8y ago
I heard it slightly different: French people work to live and German people live to work.

downrightmike 8y ago

There is also a meta to this. He is telling people in the past that their children will not have to work as long/hard. In doing this he gives people a dream to think about while they slog away in their own work. It is an escapism fantasy. I've worked at places where they lay people off, half of the group and the other half has to pick up the pieces. a few months later when it gets really bad and people are burning out, a Senior VP comes in to "listen" to people and put up a front that the company cares and tries to sell the employees on the idea that it will get better and that the company only want to keep people occupied 73% of the time. Their numbers I don't know how they came up with that 73%, but people ate it up and still got burned out, all the while talking about how things will get better and somehow that 73% will happen. It never did.

hitekker 8y ago
I believe Yuval Harari in Sapiens once said all social movements start by saying "the world, as it is, is unnatural. At some point, we were moving in the right direction but then we took a detour. We need to get back on track for the world to be natural again." You are correct that the sentiment of "things will get better, as long as we follow the way" is an empty appeal to the future. But "things use to be better, we've lost our way", that the systems around is are unnatural and therefore wrong, is a powerful drive for a complacent society. A catalyst for social change. As the oft-repeated 1984 quote goes, "Control the present, control the past. Control the past, control the future."
- roymurdock 8y ago
  natural has a completely different definition for different groups of people. was it “natural” for european settlers in America to have slaves up until the 18th century? was it “natural” for native Americans to live communally and without the ideas of property rights and ownership brought over by the Europeans? natural is such a vague and loaded term that its nearly meaningless when applied to “us” as human beings the real key is labor productivity. unless we invent new machines that make us more productive, and re jump start the demand for skilled human labor as we saw during the various industrialization periods of the last 120 years, then we will continue down a path where humans are less and less valued as their skills atrophy and they can be replaced by automated systems or more often cheaper labor doing a decent job at a much lower rate

erokar 8y ago

In reality we all work too much. 8 hours a day is extreme, we should strive for 2-4 hours.

sombremesa 8y ago
I used to work at Amazon, which is known for its draconian policies, but I was on a good team at one point. On that team, you were expected to allot no more than 4 hours a day to your tickets. The rest of the time was for meetings, code reviews, self organization, administrative tasks, 20% time, etc. Now that I'm in a company where everyone is always heads down and code reviews clog up the pipeline and no one is on the same page, I'm beginning to see that being less "productive" gets more done.
- gubbrora 8y ago
  Slow code review is really bad for productivity. Both cost of task switching as you wait, and of merging upstream changes into your branch.
- dwiel 8y ago
  That's a reasonable observation, but only loosely related to the parent post. Admin, code reviews, meetings all count towards that 2-4 hour goal
- nine_k 8y ago
  Being productive is getting things out the door to production. Writing code is only a part of this equation. If you don't have a process that cares well about the other required things (reviews, testing, meeting and thinking, etc), you end up with a lot of code written, and much less of it useful for business at a given moment.
- awshepard 8y ago
  "The Phoenix Project" references this - when a particular resource (expert) is the only person who can get some task done. Of course that means that person is at or beyond 100% utilization, which means their queue length (or wait time) goes through the roof. Paradoxically, reducing utilization increases productivity/throughput. The section about controlling WIP here [1] illustrates it quite well. [1] https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanbans-part-2/ https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-proj...

unclebucknasty 8y ago

Just yesterday, I was watching an episode of "This Week in Startups" [0]. At about 12:20, the conversation turns to jobs, UBI, etc. and his guest, Rabios, starts going on about how depressed people would be without jobs, with statements like this: >"The by-product of your toil is what makes you human in many ways, and if you pay people not to work, you're actually destroying their self-worth." My first thought was "well, that's convenient, coming from a guy who makes his living from the work of others". But, of course, it's also likely that he and the "investor-class"--as well as a broad segment of people, including much of startup culture--really are so disconnected from reality, that they can't fathom that not everyone is in a position to "create", "find fulfillment", or otherwise change the world through their labor. But, do they not notice when they see people cleaning toilets, etc? Or is it just those people's moral failing? Calacanis then goes on to make the case that young men become despondent and start riots, turn to terrorism, etc because they are unemployed. This, as if their despondency in unemployment has everything to do with not having access to work as the sole means of fulfillment; and nothing to do with the fact that we've structured society in such a way that we cannot subsist at any level of decency, except through our labor. I think these people have convinced themselves of the inherent truth of workism, because it serves them and because it is their experience. But, with this increasing disconnect and the mounting pressures faced by workers, the situation will ultimately be untenable. [0] https://youtu.be/fOS9K4UU50A https://youtu.be/fOS9K4UU50A

jblow 8y ago
Was there ever a time when a human being could subsist at any level of decency except through labor? Why then would you expect humans to be adapted to such a situation?
- daniel-cussen 8y ago
  Hunting. Gathering. You have to do things, but it's not labor. Tribes cared for their sick and old, and they would watch the children. For what you said to be true, even chewing food would have to be considered labor.
  - 8y ago

mortenjorck 8y ago

This is a fine discussion of the culture of workism, but it’s not complete without a discussion of the economics. Keynes' prediction of shorter work weeks would have been much closer to the mark if the gains in productivity in the latter part of the century had been reflected in commensurately higher per-hour compensation.

Animats 8y ago

Not a new idea. See "Stakhanovite_movement".[1] Capitalism does it better than Communism did, by pushing competitiveness down to the individual. The destruction of unions made this possible. It's so much more cost effective than slavery. Slavery doesn't provide a just in time workforce. Slaves are a capital expense and an ongoing operating cost. Capitalist workers are disposable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

coldtea 8y ago

It also makes them poor. Not only because the most valuable resource is time (and they are not getting those extra work time back, at least not while they're as young to enjoy them), but also because if companies depend on the marginal benefits of working more hours, then the workplace is a race to the bottom.

jl2718 8y ago

For the American Natives, when the landscape was lush and the population was low, almost all time was spent in leisure. Then settlers came and made farms which were massively more productive, but they had to work a lot more because they were feeding a city of people doing other things. In the city, people can’t farm, so they have to buy food and shelter by inventing goods and services to trade for it which previously had no value. Then in these markets too, productivity increases so that a small number of people are working very hard to provide a low-value product to a large number of people. As productivity increases, so must scale, and workers are displaced, who must then find a way to sustain themselves by creating a new product that is even less necessary to survival and well-being. This basic economic cycle is immutable regardless of the political system or label you place on it, and I believe that Keynes was a charlatan to deny it. A time traveler from the past might assume that we are all in some kind of penal colony being forced to do absolutely nothing and stressed out about random punishments for meaningless transgressions. There is one thing that breaks the cycle: population decline. It was the plague that broke the pointless misery of the feudal system. In our world, even voluntary population decline is considered such a crisis that leaders are eager to sacrifice all forms of sustainability for any kind of growth. Unwise.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Wow. It's almost like humans are governed by the same rules as algae blooms and predator-prey systems, where unsustainable growth causes total collapse on a timescale somewhat longer than any individual's life.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  We are and we aren’t. Both the society and the social creature are co-evolving so the carrying capacity land has for a human can change dramatically due to culture. Of course there is a minimum caloric basis but the world can produce much more than subsistence calories for 10 billion people and has for a long time. Just in terms of murder and calories we are actually no longer constrained by predator/prey. For now.
  - 8y ago

acd 8y ago

I think America would be better if you had 5-6 weeks of vacation and/or 4 days workweek and a year of parental. Then you would have better work life balance and be happier in general!

maxxxxx 8y ago
Especially a minimum amount of vacation time would also be market friendly because everybody could compete on the same level.

DiseasedBadger 8y ago

"Not getting paidism" is killing Americans. Does anyone remember houses? Honestly I barely remember living in a house. I probably never will again.

sircastor 8y ago
This exposes to me how privileged I really am. I have lived almost exclusively in houses my whole life. There are exceptions like college, but for the most part I've enjoyed a detached house on suburbia.
- meddlepal 8y ago
  Meh, most people can afford a house somewhere in the US. I have a friend that does gas station convenience store attendant level work and owns a house in Iowa. It isn't much but it has a yard, was in decent shape at purchase and only cost him about 100K. What most people mean when they say they can't afford a house is they can't afford a house in or near Boston, NYC, Seattle, SF, DC or some other hot and important urban market. That's an entitlement problem not an affordability problem. People feel entitled to live in certain locations.
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    I'd go with people "aspire" to live near a good mix of culture and opportunities. That's why these places are expensive.
  - mnm1 8y ago
    It's so entitled that all these people want to live in places that have jobs. How unbelievably elitist they are to want to work for a living. /s
    - hellisothers 8y ago
      Living in an area and owning a house are not the same thing. I 100% understand the desire and angst/emotion but don’t get the entitlement, that one deserves this, it can never work out for everybody. Living in SF area I want to understand this point of view, plz point me at a good articulation.

spynxic 8y ago

It's interesting to see the range of perspectives on work put forth in this thread. I'd only point out how strange it is that the question of what is being worked towards isn't more often in these discussions. I can only imagine that is because there is predominate perception of individuals as competitors rather than allies. Unfortunately such a perception keeps the masses grasping for their share rather than promoting a common drive towards abundance.

huffmsa 8y ago

> In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. Surprise, a 70% marginal tax rate makes people reluctant to work when making dollars at that rate.

paulryanrogers 8y ago

> But everybody worships something. Bullshit. This meme needs to die. People may desire meaning in their lives, but that's generally a sign they have ascended higher on Maslow's pyramid. And finding meaning in certain kinds of work is still considered noble: education, small scale agriculture, charity, etc. Perhaps other industries could be equally fulfilling if workers gained a larger share of the spoils of their labor.

jm__87 8y ago
This statement is actually what stood out the most to me because I disagree with it. But, I actually disagree with you that people at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid don't need meaning. If anything, these people need meaning in their lives far more than the people at the top of the pyramid - otherwise, how does one justify all the suffering they must go through on a day to day basis. If you're struggling to make ends meet, having some meaning in your life such as children to raise and feed will make the struggle feel justified. You're not just working those long hours for low pay so you can go home and eat, sleep and repeat, you're doing it for your family and hopefully your children will have a better future as a result of your hard work.

Mr_Shiba 8y ago

Curious, I just red "It doesn't have to be crazy at work" by David Heinemeier Hansson. Could not be more true, we have created a toxic amoral culture that is making everyone miserable. This work thing, the whole point is to make our life better, not worse.

craftinator 8y ago

No shit. Our government has engineered a culture of fear to coerce the average person to work themselves as hard as they can, increasing the governments power and posh lifestyles for its elite, president, congresspeople, senior officials etc...

mnm1 8y ago

This workism sounds exactly like the puritanical ideological bullshit that's been going around in America for hundreds of years fueling all types of hideous cultural practices like the current obsession with work and productivity. This is clearly a culture pushed by the business owners who undoubtedly would be happy to have slavery back if it applied to everyone but themselves. It's sick, disgusting, and oppressive. It's the sign of a seriously broken culture and society that no longer meets the needs of workers but only of their masters. I don't know how you fix this at the societal level because such stupid ideology has been around for so long, but at the individual level it's possible. Individuals can start to recognize and see through the bullshit of this ideology. Some will even be able to disconnect further from work and focus on what they value rather than what their masters value. The more disconnected, the more disengaged, and the less work people put in for their overlords, the happier they will be. One promising avenue is remote work. In a remote setting it's much easier to reject this stupidity and just focus on doing a reasonable amount of work, then moving on to non work stuff. Some management of appearances is necessary, of course, as the corporate overlords would be unhappy if they found out their employees were not 100% invested even if they did all the work asked on time with great quality. This is one of the worst aspects of American culture. It's almost like the slavery mindset never died. Instead, the new wage slaves have taken the mindset and co-opted it for their own identities. If I had to guess why, it'd probably be because our society does not provide much else for most people. Money is such a focus, most people never think of anything else, even when they have plenty of money. Or perhaps in a society where any little accident can bankrupt a person and send them to skid row homeless, there's no such thing as enough money and people are too scared to do anything but work and earn money. I know this last thing keeps me up at night, and I have to consciously remind myself that there is more to life than preparing for disaster.

samhain 8y ago
For me, I will not have children. I would never subject another human to this kind of life.
- QualityReboot 8y ago
  Same. I don't want to birth a human into a life of slavery. If I secure enough wealth that I don't have to work, and my children wouldn't have to work, only then would I have kids.

deleted 8y ago

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swayvil 8y ago

If I was a capitalistic billionaire, "Workism" is a religion that I would definitely encourage in my serfs.

maerF0x0 8y ago

> There is new enthusiasm for universal policies—like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized child care, and a child allowance—which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These universal policies will only exacerbate the load on those who work. Remember that when ever the government spends money on "someone" that money comes from someone who had to work to produce it. Universal income that dismantles the bureaucracy and keeps the budget status quo could be a better system, but one that increases the budget will just put more labor on the shoulders of those who work.

rajacombinator 8y ago

Keep in mind this is a result of great powers applying simultaneous asset inflation and wage suppression to destroy this country.

Sortofeven8811 8y ago

47 1/2 years as a wage slave, by choice, and never heard of such non sense. I have known co-workers over time who may believe this theory. I treated time off, every minute, as a mini vacation be it weekends, paid holidays, paid vacation, paid sick leave and time off during labor strikes during which I would work part time to keep fiscally healthy. How time off is managed is key. If the job has no 'percs', sickness will result.

strikelaserclaw 8y ago

I would say those things that gave most Americans a sense of identity like community, religion or whatever are completely eroding. People move away to colleges, move away for jobs, i think we live in an era where the world looks so vast and chaotic, so people look for meaning in things they feel that are in their control, their work.